sexy garbage
learning to write a novel by writing a novel
My first EVER interview, by the wonderful staff of Feign, is posted: Interview with Liina Koivula. I can’t say enough good things about working with Feign. Send them your work right now. They publish fiction only, up to 6000 words, a higher word count than most.
This is my fourth year doing #1000wordsofsummer, an annual practice I highly value and recommend. In past years I’ve written what I lovingly call “sexy garbage,” but this year I re-entered my novel-in-progress for real. I added chapters to the novel during #1000wordsofsummer 2023, and the first several days went well, until it became…sexy garbage. Because if it’s late at night and you’re out of ideas, all the characters over the age of 18 might as well fuck, right? I’m consistently shocked when I re-read those passages.
Side note: I recently read an absolutely ridiculous Substack post where the author claims to have polled her own Instagram followers and found that 60% don’t want an explicit sex scene in their literary fiction, therefore, the “majority” of readers do not want sex scenes in literature. She further claims that sex scenes in literature are simply the author’s fetishes on display. For myself, most of the sex I have put down on the page is unlike any sex I have ever had, often not sex I would want to have, and never what I fantasize about because my fantasies tend to be abstract. And like, whatever, this writer is entitled to her opinion, but the false authority she wrote with was grating. ANYWAY, we’re SEX POSITIVE (is that an antiquated term now?) over here at Lifeguard of Love! And that absolutely includes literary fiction! That said, unless I someday write an erotic piece for an audience (we have a queer erotica open mic in a neighboring town out here in Western Massachusetts because the world is still a wonderful place despite encroaching fascism and war?), no one’s going to read my sexy garbage. Not even Kaden.
My #1000wordsofsummer practice was to add 1000 words to each of the first 14 chapters of my novel-in-progress. I’d given myself an extra step: I had to read each chapter before I could add to it.
Elevator pitch: Vietnam War era, a rural gay draft dodging drug dealer and the woman who loves him.
It takes place in Olympia. It takes place at the house, on the land, where I grew up. Shortly after my parents moved there, a woman came down the driveway and asked to see inside. She said, “I think I used to live here…yeah…I used to live here…we were doing a lot of drugs.” A young man was hired to insulate under the house. He told my parents he too used to live there, and he and his dad would drink beers and toss the bottles into the lake. My parents had spent hours pulling broken glass out of the lake shore. When my mom tells the story, she says, “I told him, ‘get back under that house!’” I have heard these stories for as long as I can remember. Now I’m writing the (fictional) stories of these former residents. It is deeply gratifying.
I’d written these chapters in the style of short stories, the style I know how to use. I’m learning how to slow down and spread out, and you can only learn by doing. I’m letting myself learn how to write a novel by writing a novel. The push to write 1000 words is awesome. What you can uncover when you have to keep writing more words. Themes can be carried out more robustly. Scenes demonstrate how a character Does a Thing. Interpersonal tensions arise that might otherwise have remained dormant or off the page. It comes together.
The night before #1000wordsofsummer began, I completed a first draft of my linked short story collection, meeting my goal. My last step was to search for certain words I thought might have been repeated too many times. I had 4 instances of “bristle” as in, what someone does when they resent what someone else is saying. I wondered if I used the f-word too much. Yes. I had 97 instances of the word “fuck.” I had 69 instances of the word “shit” (11 of those “bullshit”). I had 74 mentions of “beer,” including 10 instances of “another beer.” “Stoned”: 22. “Sex”: 44. Only 7 out of 20 short stories technically pass the Bechdel test, and a couple are seriously on a technicality.
But, you know what, fuck it. This is what my fiction is made of. Someone is going to like it. And if they don’t, I still like it. I love it. I got stoned and re-read my two most-stylistically-different-from-the-rest stories and I was like, these are amazing, these are perfect.
I got “fuck” down to 59, and “shit” down to 49, in the end.
Now it is a week+ after completing #1000wordsofsummer. Today, I did a full re-read of those 14 chapters. Most of it is pretty, uh, drafty, and I kind of can’t believe that I took the earliest version to workshop (LOVE TO MY FORMER CLASSMATES). But I did flesh out/flush out each chapter, and they no longer read tonally like short stories – the whole thing feels more novelistic. The first chapters are rough. The novel doesn’t know where to begin, how to build momentum. I’m still missing a sense of danger (queer, draft dodging, drug dealing), but this draft focuses on the relationships, how the characters treat one another. A future draft can focus on tension, on danger, on starting in the right place.
The first year I did #1000words of summer, it was the last two weeks of the first year of my MFA classes. The second year, it was the two weeks after graduation, and we were traveling and visiting loved ones. Last year, it was the first two weeks Kaden was home after we’d been living apart for nine months. It never falls at a convenient time. Which is part of the charm and the challenge.
This year, the last 5 days of the practice, Kaden’s parents were visiting from Washington state. One night, I was about to skip it, and Kaden’s like, “What if you just sat down and wrote?” It meant so much to me that he pushed me, encouraged me, and I wrote.
Yesterday, the U.S. officially entered Israel’s war against Iran. Lifeguard of Love opposes all war, all weapons manufacturing and sales, all forms of fascism, all oppression by those in power against the people. I had, stupidly, held out a tiny bit of optimism that this was the one thing this so-called administration might do right, not cause more death and destruction around the world (we know the Democrats are all about that shit). I was wrong.
Last week, before this happened, after we’d gone to the No Kings rally in Northampton, I asked Kaden’s parents, did the Vietnam War-era feel as scary as now feels? Kaden’s dad unhesitatingly said, yes. The government and the media were lying about winning the war, and young men his age were being drafted and killed, and/or killing, for this bogus claim against ‘communism’. I found it strangely comforting, to know that things have felt this scary before. Of course, the major difference between then and now is surveillance technology, and I suspect people in our parents’ age group aren’t thinking about that as much, especially given the amount of recording I saw being done by gray-haired folks at the rally. The number of times, during family discussions about safety concerns, where I said, “But that’s the thing: we don’t know exactly what information they have access to.”
I love that you did the word search and got fucks from 97 to 59!
I love that you did the word search and got fucks from 97 to 59!