Trying to be a good homie and make it easier for people to find my thoughts on writing craft so it's not just floating around in twitter replies. I'm expanding on my thoughts from the previous post I made about how to write good sex scenes which I recommend reading first if you haven't already.

from twitter: "something I often see people complain about in porn is a lack of interesting or sexy words to apply to body parts, but really, the words that make you cringe are typically just words you associate with un-sexy things. like your parents, or angry gamer bros. CONTEXT IS KING.
you can come up with an infinite number of ways to describe genitals if you really get into a character's headspace and their knowledge base. the words shouldn't come from YOU. they should come from your character. it helps pave the way both to believable dialogue and horniness
I genuinely think every fiction writer who wants to write good dialogue should study acting even for a brief time. writing and acting go hand in hand, especially if you want to convince people they're not just reading YOUR thoughts, but the thoughts of a lil freak you made up"

Re: what words sound like they're from bad porn?

from twitter: "honestly this is subjective because something that feels like it was taken straight from bad porn will be able to go off flawlessly in another piece! the idea is not to sanction off certain words as bad or overused, but to never take the easy, generic route—BUT there are questions you can keep in your brain like "what is the porn in THIS world like? what embarrasses these characters? what does this character fantasize about?" every single story is its own monster so it's best to take them one at a time and not fall on b&w rules."

The idea isn't to go out of your way to NEVER use "porn sounding" language, it's to make sure that the words you're choosing make sense in the mouths of the characters speaking them, or in that particular narrative prose perspective you chose. Sometimes characters call each other baby and it makes perfect sense to me, and other times characters call each other baby and I stop because it sounds like the AUTHOR is inserting themselves into the character just for the chance to call a character "baby". 

Sometimes language dissonance is fun, but that's something that works best when you've previously established narrative in-world expectations, not just your authorial reaction to IRL fiction trends. I know a lot of people have fun doing reversals on typical porn dynamics, but your pieces still need to be able to stand on their own legs, not just in the grand scheme of the pornographic literary canon. Think about who's going to get to read your piece in 5 years, who has no fucking clue what you, the author, were reacting to when you wrote it.

I think a lot of porn jumpscares (i.e. language that pops up and kills your boner) happens when the piece isn't already saturated in the horny lexicon of the world. This just goes back to world building. There are certain words that hit so much better and hotter when you've seen them BEFORE the sex scene, so you understand the piece's relationship to these concepts. Find ways to bring up how characters talk about genitals before their whipping their dicks out so I know what's expected of the WORLD, and it'll read less like a porn mad-libs.

I'm preserving these two posts from twitter because it's relevant. What I desire most in porn is to see the characters becoming horny about something IN REAL TIME, not just an expectation of "well you like feet, so here's some fucking feet." Respect the kink! Respect me! Get indulgent. Unwrap it like a present. Don't take shortcuts just because you're relying on a shared language between perverts. 

I try to write every piece as if I'm trying to convince every reader to understand what my character is about to cum to. I never want to rely on shorthand, because the fun of writing is getting to live in those little carnal details that can pass you by if you're NOT horny for it. I'm here to put a microscope on this bonerade so that even people who hate feet will see why my character is jerking off to it in the heat of the moment. Maybe I can't convince YOU to jerk off to feet, but maybe you'll get a little hard reading about this guy about to cream his pants because HE'S so lost in the arches.

(text from the image of my tweets reads: "a good writer can give me a kink i didn't know i had because i will be able to see it through the eyes of the character who has that kink. porn is usually centered on, and catered to, a specific kink. porn still functions without stellar writing craft because it relies on you already being horny for something in the concept. i'm a lot more forgiving seeking out horny porn. but good writing penetrates every scene.")

Feel free to ask questions on substar if you want to! I'm not the end all be all, but I like to do my best to help people when they're hitting road blocks!

This write up is full of spoilers, so please read at your own risk. 

Immediately after watching this film I thought, "that was cute."
A few days later, my delayed processing caught up with me and I thought, "I fuckin loved that."

The first thing I noticed about The Boy and The Heron was how quiet it was. I know my man Miyazaki loves his Joe Hisaishi sweeping orchestral music, so it was noticeable to me how much of the movie forwent any music at all, not even the twinkling piano that this duo is so fond of using to underscore soft moments. On top of that, the people themselves are often pretty quiet. This is a protagonist who notably does not ever voice his ambient thoughts or feelings or actions as he moves through the story. I adore Spirited Away and Howl, and one of the hallmarks of those films to me is how often Chihiro and Sophie speak aloud what they're doing or how they're feeling. It felt significant that Mahito never really does this. He is a quiet boy, very clearly left to his own devices after the mother he adored passed away.

When the movies choose to let its characters talk, it oscillates between very pointed and very abstract dialogue. I don't think it cares much if I kept up or got all the details. It reminds me of The Cat Returns in some of its more nonsensical moments, (which in turn itself reminds me of Fantasia a bit) but the Boy and the Heron delves into the chaos with a more serious and contemplative atmosphere, as a reflection of our very serious, young protagonist.

I haven't checked in with Miyazaki in a minute. I never saw Wind Rises. I read somewhere that he and his son patched things up since their infamous blowout over Wizard of Earthsea. I honestly hope everyone is doing well. I like to believe that Miyazaki made this film strictly because he wanted to, and that's why the movie doesn't particularly give a shit if I understood what it was saying. And for that, I am really grateful for it. I'm sick of that perilous feeling that so many stories are suffused with where the creators have a deathgrip on their own ideas. So many shows and movies and books give me the impression that the author behind it needs me to understand exactly what their personal point of view is. It needs to be obvious that they said the right things, and got away with the clever twist, felt bad for the right people, and demonized the others with perfectly legal capital punishments.

Mahito very clearly doesn't have the luxury of someone with good strong morals educating him on what is right and what is wrong. His father is busy overseeing the construction of warplanes and ignoring his family. Mahito lost one mother to sickness which left her hospital bound and helpless when said hospital caught fire. A few years later, Mahito is staunchly refusing his father's new wife—his own aunt—by strictly referring to her as his father's significant other. The narrative isn't concerned with the specifics on the timeline of how his aunt became his father's new bride. Why should it elucidate this when our hero is actively turning his cheek from it? He wants his real mother, and only his real mother, and she's gone.

After Mahito and his father move to his aunt’s family home out in the country, we see Mahito getting bullied at school in another unspoken sequence. It took me a while to realize that Mahito is basically the rich military family boy who shows up in the rural school and gets picked on by the local poor kids. After his little boy fist fight, alone in the countryside that he did not grow up in, Mahito picks up a rock and slams it against his own head, worsening his injuries. We are given no explanation for this. All we see is an angry, silent, isolated child making a decision to make it all worse. He won't tell us why, just as he refuses to tell his vengeance-obsessed father who was responsible. Perhaps Mahito recognizes that he is an invasive species in these other kids’ lives, and that no one wants him there, not even he wants to be here. There is no point in getting those kids in trouble. Maybe Mahito did that to himself with the express hope that his father would pull him out of school so he wouldn’t have to continue being around the kids who hate him. Maybe he just wanted his dad to pay attention to him.

I don't need to know why the boy hit himself with a rock. What matters is the feeling the action conveys. He is very likely numbed by grief and the continued ignorance of his father. Or maybe he's just a spoiled brat who wants attention. It's really up to you how the narrative sits on your shoulders. 

It is clear to me that Mahito's father sucks, but again, the story doesn't go out of its way to luxuriate in this. It is presented as fact in the same way that the setting is. We’re not given commentary, but are left to make our own conclusions based on the few bits of concrete information we get. The first thing we see of him is the incredibly fast cut from Mahito's mother passing away to a faceless shot of Mahito's aunt putting his father's hand on her belly, announcing a new child. I imagine that's what it felt like to Mahito, like no time at all passed before his father married someone who isn’t as good as his mother. 

It's a reasonable match, to marry the sister of your deceased wife, and if I’m not mistaken, this used to be way more common. You know the family already, they look similar, and the new person has a connection to your existing child. For a man who's primary concern is the running of his military fighter plane business, it makes perfect sense. For a child who's favorite person is seemingly getting replaced by her less exciting sister, it probably feels like further ignorance from the man who is supposed to be responsible for them all. Did his father even love his mother if he is so quick to replace gold with silver? What does it say about his relationship with his son, and subsequent new child? 

The movie isn't going to answer those questions. That's for us to think about it.

(Another thing that’s never explicitly stated is that Mahito’s dad is responsible for the construction of these fighter planes. The only indication we get is the man presiding over a room full of the glass shells that cover the cockpits of planes. I made the connection between the bloodthirsty birds populating the magical other world and the fighter planes. To some little kids, military planes are like massive cool toys. To other kids, a plane loaded with weapons is really no different from a massive bird stalking you with a knife to cook you for dinner.)

Mahito's aunt, Natsuko, is getting sicker as her pregnancy gets further along, which must be a terrifying echo to Mahito who's first mother died in a hospital. Natsuko keeps asking for Mahito, and everyone tells him that he should make time for her, but what is time to a boy who just had his real mother taken from him much too soon? Instead, Mahito concerns himself with the fucking horrifying heron that's haunting his new home.

I loved the animation flexing with the subtle reveal of the heron and the man coexisting in a body. The heron himself is a great character, a not-so-wise man there to push Mahito toward the mystery of his ancestor's weird secret tower in the woods. The heron tries to lure Mahito into the tower with the promise of seeing his dead mother again—a trick Mahito calls out immediately, as death is far too real for him. Only after Mahito watches his sickly pregnant aunt disappear into the woods does he finally commit to seeing the tower, but whenever he's asked about it, he insists he's only there to see his mother, or to get his father's wife back. He denies any affection for his aunt for a big chunk of the film, despite undertaking this journey in part to save her life.

(It’s all the more sad because Mahito isn’t aware of the moment where Natsuko takes up a beautiful bow and fires an arrow from a great distance to scare off the trickster heron. It’s how we, the viewers, see her caring for him without any expectation of her affection getting returned, and our first indication that she knows much more than she’s saying. But this action isn’t what endears Mahito to her. He finds that emotion naturally on his own.)

After Mahito suits up with his own homemade bow and arrow to go save his aunt, and maybe see if his mother really IS in that tower, we are shown Mahito’s father making the pragmatic and monstrous decision to stop searching for his brand new pregnant bride and son in order to continue his much needed business so his precious fighter planes can continue getting built unimpeded. Here is a man who quite literally makes blood money who does not even realize in that moment that Mahito is taking on the task of saving his family. All for the war machine, baby.

As Mahito enters the tower, we are slowly shown that there are two worlds housed within each other, the one Mahito was born in that the audience recognizes, and the nonsensical, magical one that his great uncle runs with a set of what looks like children's building blocks. Here we are served up gorgeous settings that spill over into each other like pools of different colored paint. This world is made of magic, built upon a precious stack of mismatched blocks that were never designed to fit together naturally. It is a disjointed, messy, dangerous and beautiful world contained within an impossible rock that fell from space. 

Through Mahito’s search for his family, we are taken through these contemplative quiet sequences, again with noticeably little dialogue for a lot of it. We are shown a gorgeous field full of hungry, desperate pelicans. We are taken across a vast ocean full of massive fish. We are shown a stunning sequence of life and death between the adorable warawara creatures and the invasive pelican species that reveals the interconnected nature of this fantasy world and the real world. It is in that sequence that we meet Himi, a young woman who can control fire. 

In an attempt to save the helpless warawara on their journey to bring life to Mahito’s world, Himi uses great blasts of fire to chase off the hungry birds, and in so doing, winds up accidentally killing some of the warawara herself. This happens while Mahito watches helplessly from the sides, nothing but a spectator. When Mahito finds a scorched and dying pelican in the aftermath, the bird explains that all of them were brought into the world by mistake, and must eat these creatures to survive. Does a wild animal not deserve food? Again, the movie will not answer this question. Why should it? We, too, are spectators on the sides, unable to influence anything in this movie, anything in the art that we look at.

This movie understands the worth of asking an unanswerable question. It is filled with them. 

Himi herself is an unanswerable question. As it turns out, she is younger version of Mahito’s mother, existing in this impossible world with Mahito’s great uncle who disappeared from the “real” world years ago. The first thing we see of her is this terrible moment of her using fire and killing a few innocent souls in order to save many more. This is the woman whom Mahito adores. His mother who married a rich man of wealth built on war planes that kill people. Later, when Himi realizes that she is meant to be Mahito’s mother in his world, Mahito warns her that she’s just going to die in a fire if she goes to fulfill that role. In response, she him that fire never scared her, and she really wants to be his mother.  

Does she mean the fire that killed her? Does she mean the fire of war? Does she mean the fire of Mahito’s father? Himi is a fascinating and complex equation that mostly goes uncommented on because we are focused on the point of view of a child who could never in a million years answer the question “are my parents good or bad people?” A silent and angry child who does not understand his place in the world, who wants love from two people who can’t give it, and cannot trust when it’s given to him by anyone else. 

In this fantasy world full of invasive, bloodthirsty birds and humans who seem to straddle multiple worlds, Mahito is shown life and death in numerous angles. He watches a woman kill a gigantic fish, and is shown how to gut that fish so they can feed it to the warawara who appear to need the organs of dead things in order to become the souls of living things. We see humanoid versions of the invasive birds trying to kill and eat Mahito at various times. And all of this is underscored by the impending birth of a new sibling for Mahito while Natsuko is sequestered in a dark, intimidating birthing room. 

Over the course of the film, we are drip fed these enigmatic shots of Mahito’s great uncle, a very old scholar who found this strange magic tower in the woods, and disappeared inside of it to search for knowledge. We see him with the building blocks stacking them in precarious fashion because, as we learn, every single day this man must restack the blocks in a new configuration and pray that they don’t collapse, lest this world collapse with it. This old man has seen something in Mahito, the makings of a successor, and so he plans to give this magic world and all its responsibilities to his very young nephew. 

Mahito himself is utterly unaware of this plan. He is busy trying to rescue his aunt and squeezing in time with the girl who is, or will become his mother. After transgressing in this weird kingdom, Mahito draws the attention of the bird king. These invasive birds are so numerous, they have built an entire society within the tower, complete with a king who fights for his people. There are more birds than humans in this world that they are not native to. We never see them shown in any particularly positive light, but the implications go beyond the scope of the film. It is the great uncle who brought these birds into the tower with him, and so it is this man the birds answer to even after they have greatly outnumbered him and his family. 

It is a fraught world full of death and life and violence and magic. Mahito moves through it as a boy in search of his family. The birds move through it in search of food. The warawara move through it as helpless creatures. Himi cuts through this world with a seemingly uncontrollable kind of power that hurts in the same breath as it helps.

When the bird king goes to the human ruler of this place and asks for Mahito’s punishment, he is told the Mahito is to inherit this place. The bird king is obviously unsatisfied with this answer, and schemes to take matters into his own hands. At the same time as this little revenge scheme is set into motion, we see Mahito’s human father in the other world plotting to go after whoever kidnapped his wife and child with his sword in his belt.

One of my favorite moments in this movie is when the great uncle is explaining to Mahito that he has been chosen to take over the land, and that all he must do is stack these blocks with care once a day, or the whole place will go with it. Mahito simply says no. He has no desire to rule, or to play with these blocks. In the course of this film, he has realized the role that Natsuko plays in his life, that while his father was busy ignoring him, Natsuko showed care and concern without asking for anything back. He has realized that he does have a mother, and that connection is far more important to him than ruling over some magical land that he did not grow up with—a position he has not earned. 

The bird king overhears this conversation, and rushes in to say, that’s it? All you need to do to rule this place is to stack these simple little blocks? The ruler of invasive birds with a sword in his belt immediately stacks the blocks with his chest puffed up, and just as quickly begins to sweat as the tower wobbles, and then collapses. The world itself then begins to collapse as Mahito’s father, with sword in his belt, prepares to charge the tower in the woods from the outside world where he believes his wife and child have been kidnapped. 

The block metaphor hit me so right. This man spends the bulk of his life building these shaky little towers in silence to support this beautiful and terrible world. Sometimes art is messy and you feel like you're just barely balancing shit together to make it function while invasive blood thirsty parrots that you yourself accidentally introduced are trying to ruin everything from the inside. Sometimes you spend so much time looking at a piece, all you can see are the building blocks, and not the sprawling and lush ecosystem that took root. Sometimes you are meant to lose yourself in the details, and sometimes you are meant to climb to the top of the tower and behold it all as one. There is no one correct way to view art, but the answer is almost never to rush in and decide for yourself how the tower is to be built in three seconds flat.

The viewer does not get to decide the pace at which art is made or revealed.

Of course, that’s a personal read on the theme. A more literal read would be to examine the men of this film who take what isn’t theirs and decide how it is run, who it really belongs to, and what is to be done with it. Mahito is a child of a war profiteer, and the great nephew of a man who wandered into a tower that quite literally fell from space and became its ruler. Both of these men stand on top of empires, one of blood money and one of magic. They both impose their will on Mahito in different ways. You are my heir, they both promise, of worlds on the brink of collapse. We see Mahito say no quite clearly to the man who runs the tower. We don’t see him say no to his father, but we do see him accept Natsuko—accepting love. He refuses a kingdom that never really belonged to his family in the first place. We cannot be guaranteed that Mahito won’t screw up at some point with his father, but we can hope that he’ll be able to connect the dots the way that we, as an audience, are being left to connect the dots.

A theme that constantly appears in Miyazaki’s films is that of children grappling with concepts much bigger than them. Here, I think the metaphor is extended to the viewer, but it’s important to acknowledge the obvious. Children do not get to choose when they learn about death and life and birth and grief and hospital rooms that catch fire. When their parents are absent, the world becomes their teacher, and everyone knows that you cannot impose your own needs on the world. It will spin at its own pace no matter what you want from it. It is a kindness that there are adults in Mahito’s life who choose to help him and offer him lessons. We see it in the heron and we see it in Kiriko. But it is not what’s supposed to happen. A parent should be willing to have these difficult conversations, rather than burying themselves in work. We can cheer for a young child navigating strange fantastical worlds like Mahito here, or Chihiro in Spirited Away, but it is sad that a child should be there at all. Yes, Mahito gets to return to the real world with a woman who loves him and the promise of a sibling he can bond with, but he’s also returning to the father who probably should never have been a father at all. Just as we watched Mahito’s mother choosing to sacrifice a few for the sake of many, this story is bittersweet to the last. We cannot save a dead parent. We cannot punish every neglectful parent. We can only hope that the world will be kinder to the people getting swept along in its current.

And just as Mahito does not get to choose the pace at which he learns how the world works, we do not control the pace of this movie. We are at Mahito’s level, dragged along with him through what may feel like a chaotic world at first. In my experience, you only need to spend some time with it before you can see how everything connects, the building blocks that hold it all together, but perhaps I’m just exhausted by stories that grab me by the hand and force feed every clean message and moral from the author. When it comes to stories that take place in fantastic worlds, I prefer to be at the character’s level, not the author’s. If that means taking on the perspective of a lost and angry and numb little boy, I’m fine with that. 

Funny how a story from the POV of a child is so much more dense and meaty and subtle to me than so many stories about adults that seem to treat its viewers like children for the blunt force at which they deliver their black and white messages. 

Almost everything in this film is taken from Miyazaki’s very familiar toy box. We’ve seen him do most of this before in different worlds, different stories. The warawara and the soot sprites and the kodama and even the various totoros all share DNA. The chaos of this magical tower isn’t really all that different from the wacky shit going on in The Cat Returns, or the dark magic in Howl’s Moving Castle. Everyone knows at this point that Miyazaki is vehemently anti-war, it’s in nearly every one of his films. Sick mothers and estranged siblings and time bending shenanigans are woven throughout his entire body of work. I wasn’t upset about it the 2nd or 3rd or 4th or 5th time. Why would I suddenly be tired of it now? An artist’s favorite ingredient list is part of what makes them interesting. The ability to cook several different dishes from the same pantry and make them all taste subtly different is a skill. Not everyone can do it. Most people struggle to make one dish good enough to eat, let alone a dozen.

Miyazaki is 82 years old. He went quiet for 10 years and came out of retirement to make this movie. I do not think this is his best work, but I do think it is a personal work, and for that it is special to me. I’ve never been as old as I currently am. That sounds stupid to point out, but it’s good to remember sometimes. We are all as old as we’ve ever been. This man is 50 years my senior, and he decided he had paint left on the palette. What he made spoke to me. I was a literal child when I saw my first Miyazaki film—Spirited Away shown in a movie theater. It was truly a life altering experience to be so young, as young as the protagonist, and see a story that was so very alive and quite literally SPIRITED, and markedly different from the western movies I was used to. It always struck me as profoundly sad that Chihiro’s supposedly happy ending was returning to her, let’s face it, pig-headed parents. Now I am the age of these children’s parents, feeling like I am still learning everyday what the fuck it is to be an adult. I’m watching these children and I’m watching these flawed and strange adults and I am able to see a bit of myself in every one of them. 

Watching The Boy and The Heron was also a reminder that sometimes it’s good to only know a creator through their work. I have no desire to pick apart Miyazaki as a man when his work speaks so loudly to me. And so I hold this movie in a line of his other movies and I ask what it is that feels different, unique, familiar, unsurprising, comfortable, or uncomfortable. My brother asked me at one point if the lines of the animation felt different from the usual and I had to think on it. I’m not an animator. I said, no, nothing about that felt different except perhaps more modern tools at work. What feels different to me here is that this film cares about silence—silence imposed and silence chosen. The silence of a person who passed away, the silence of a person who should be your guide who would rather dote on his business. And, of course, the selfishness of suffering in silence when you’re ignoring someone who loves you unconditionally.

I don’t want to propose my read on this film as the only correct way to look at it. I only wanted to allow myself to dig my fingers in there and shake up all the pieces that excite me. I didn’t even write down every detail I loved—I laughed aloud at several points, I love that stupid heron. But I have to stop writing eventually. You’re welcome to hate or love or tolerate this movie on your own terms. I think it deserves its spot amongst the other wonderful things Miyazaki made, but maybe I’m being too generous with an artist whose work I love. I don’t really care one way or another if I’m being honest.   

Also I am obsessed with this write up on Variety. “If his retirement is to be believed” fucking get his octagenarian ass. 

 

I am not actually going to tell you how to do this. I'm not writing your pieces for you, and there is no one tried and true method. But I can offer up my own thoughts about it as something for other writers/creators to ruminate on for their own process. Everyone writes differently, and I never aim to offer absolutes or hard rules. The only thing I consider a general consistency is that action scenes of any kind are some of the most difficult to execute. 

I've had many conversations about the difficulty of prose as a concept. Not only does every reader read differently, but a writer is essentially being expected to craft a memory that never existed, birth all the actors in it, and then direct them flawlessly until the reader forgets it's not real. The things you're describing have to be clear enough that anyone reading it can at least understand the visuals, sound, and emotional expression. That's a tall order even when the scene is simple. Action takes that to an entirely different level, especially when you have more than one body, and those bodies are literally rubbing up against one another. Painting moving pictures without paint is never going to be easy.

I've been doing this professionally for a while now and I'm still learning. I think that's the best place to be in as an artist, but it's also intimidating to retain the understanding that, hey, this is tough. I can still fuck up. That being said, I'm no longer scared of these scenes. Part of that is just finally having confidence, being able to trust my own process, and part of that is having faith in my editing abilities which have also come a long way. The biggest thing I fall back on, however, is rhythm.

I used to take much more detailed notes on how I wanted sex scenes to go. I would give myself beats, the same I would with any kind of multi-step scene. They were pretty absurd. It would come out looking something like this:

sheepish discussion. inch closer. testing the water. A begrudgingly apologizes to B. B likes the haughty look, kisses them on the mouth. A takes it way too fucking far because oops he's been way more horny. get off with mouth? knock something over. A takes control of conversation.

I never want to plan too much because I have the kind of brain that can release the "we're done" chemicals before I finish writing if I already know everything that's going to happen down to the minute. I tend to start vague and build out from there, which I think is good advice for any writer and for any scene. Sticking to a vague beat list also leaves me improvisation room, which is extremely important to me as a storyteller. I thrive on improv and of-the-moment lines. If you know your beats at minimum, you'll have a much better idea on how to string them together. They act as a road map without restricting you.

I go into sex scenes with one main goal in mind (i.e. character A getting off character B, or first time doing X, or incorporating whatever kink/location/object, or exploring a shifting power dynamic, etc) and it's up to me to add the flow. A lot of the first draft writing is a balance of zooming in and out of a scene. I need to be able to focus on the words as I pick them while the energy is there and I'm thinking appropriately spur of the moment horny thoughts about the characters and action. Once that moment breaks, or I start to feel like I'm swerving too hard, I step back and reobserve the paragraph to make sure that it flowed alright, and then I step back again to take in the whole scene for the road map. If you know where you're supposed to wind up, it'll be easier to take detours without getting lost.

The energy of that balancing act is how I think about music I enjoy listening to. The way music comes together as one and selectively breaks apart to highlight individual instruments, grouping and ungrouping and regrouping, that's a huge part of prose writing for me. I'm trying to strike a balance between all the elements so nothing get stale or goes too far off the rails (which is also true for fight scenes, those are just as easy to lose track of or make stiff and boring by mistake). Music taught me a lot about tension, when to break it and when to build it.

Things I try to harmonize:
The five senses
Dialogue
Every relevant body/bodypart
Metaphor/Simile
Actual Action (if I'm reading erotica, I do eventually want to know what the actual dick is up to. don't skip the fun parts.)
Context! (what is this scene about? how did these characters get here? just because it's pornographic doesn't mean you have to abandon set up and outer/inner conflict)

Things I try to avoid:
Word repetition (particularly, pronouns. Readers always have to know what HE you're referring to. Read sentences aloud if you're unable to tell where things are landing.)
Sentence structure repetition (if every sentence starts with a character's name and states an action, they will build up and clutter. Mix up your lengths and your structures to keep things flowing. It can't be "he did this. he did that" all day.)
Too Many Metaphor/Simile (these are a dangerous drug and relying too heavily can make things too abstract if you're trying to focus on, ya know, SEX. It's a physical scene. It should have physical moments.)
Stiff action phrases that de-sexualize any movement (i.e. "He moved his legs aside so it was easier to reach", or "He pulled the covers down the bed so they could get in." Basically anything that you're putting in there as a means to explain how characters got from point A to point BJ that isn't part of the natural flow of your typical prose. Those phrases stick out like stage directions in a script. You can trust your readers to make the leap logic that people don't just stop undressing because the camera panned away.)
Anything that sounds too generically pornographic (some writers are able to take familiar phrases and surgically manipulate or deploy them in such a way that they feel fresh, but man there are certain phrases I have read in porn a hundred times and they hit me like I've accidentally swallowed bubblegum. This gum isn't good for me, and it's making me realize that I've been chewing on rubber that lost its flavor five minutes ago. This is where the context from the previous section comes in. Individualize your scenes. Make them memorable. This can disguise familiar phrases that may have grown rote or unsexy over time.)

Visual reference is just as helpful to a writer as it is to an illustrator! I've absolutely gotten up and contorted myself to see if I'm picturing an action correctly while writing, or just looked up image refs. No shame. Writing is writing, and fictionalized sex is a different thing than actual sex. When you're writing porn, you're still taking an artistic lens to lean into or exaggerate or capture a specific horny thought. You don't have to be perfectly realistic, as long as you're consistent in whatever world you've built, but if it's going to save you time just to look up a picture, look up the picture.

Basically everything I've said here is applicable to all writing, because as it turns out, good sex scenes and good fight scenes and all good scenes have the same thing in common: good writing. Just don't lose your nerve. If you can write one kind of scene well, you can figure out how to write this too. Dissect your previous works that you feel confident in. Read other porn that you think is really well done, and also porn you think is really mindlessly horny. How can you blend these two things into a style that works for you?

I do think you can glean storytelling lessons from any kind of artistic medium, but I can't stress how much faster you'll learn about PROSE by just reading other written works that really speak to you, and ones that don't! You can sometimes learn more from writing that didn't get you excited because it will more starkly clarify the places that missed you. Why did they miss you? What would you have done differently?

tl;dr all writing is hard! Sex scenes and action scenes become more intimidating because they ask for a close lens on multiple, complex, constantly interacting targets, but you can map that kind of scene just like any other, as long as you don't get scared off by the intimacy. Start out as vague as possible, and just zoom in from there. If you've gotten bored of it though, you may need to find a new angle. If you're bored while writing it, your readers will be just as bored while reading it.

If you're wondering how to end the sex scene, god, well, everyone is endlessly trying to figure this out. I go back to music as a reference point. Some songs come to bright, loud, dramatic endings. Some of them end abruptly, almost cruelly. Some of them slowly fade out leaving you with the echoes of the song clinging to you. There's no constant correct answer. You have to feel it out and ask yourself what it will sound like to experience this for the first time. What do you want it to feel like? What do the characters want it to feel like? What do the characters need? When in doubt, I say less is more. The longer you go on, the harder it is to end it.

AND... All of this is subjective! I'm not an expert, I'm only a professional. I can't actually tell you what "good" writing is. I can't even tell you what good horny writing is. I can only tell you what works for me, and how I try to apply that.

Seriously though, do at least tell me what one of their dicks is doing.

READ MY FOLLOW UP POST HERE!

In case you missed it, the finished haunted house piece is up on itchio for free dollars and no cents! https://friction-press.itch.io/hhh

It's fun to think about my trajectory as a horror enthusiast. When I was a tiny child, I walked into the living room while my dad and brother were watching Dawn of the Dead and I saw a man's face bitten in half and from that point, I think I refused to watch anything "scary" for at least ten years. It wasn't really until college that I started to dig back into it, largely in part because I went to college during the absolute manic height of everyone playing Amnesia the Dark Descent on youtube.

If Amnesia opened the door for it, I think Hannibal and Silent Hill cemented my appreciation for the genre. My roommate at the time KMO (who makes their own rad horror art btw) was much more of a pro and it was entirely their fault I started going to haunted house attractions in the flesh. We went to a bunch of them over the north east of the US.

Shout out to Eastern State Penitentiary in particular, which converts into a haunt every year in order to fund the museum they run out of the now defunct prison. They're a non profit dedicated entirely to raising awareness of the impact of mass incarceration and criminal justice reform in America. You can go to their huge haunt inside the former prison and also learn about the history of the American carceral system and how it primarily affects poor and disenfranchised citizens through unfair changes in law! If you're in the Philly area, give them your money so you can look at their rad set pieces using actual broken down prison cells AND reflect on America having the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world! :)

https://www.easternstate.org/halloween/

My fictional haunted house is not set in a prison, just a house. A house with many rooms. Maybe someone lives in it. Maybe he just works there. Who knows? The temptation to unmask monsters and people is so deep and real, but characters who get to remain concealed for their entire stories are so special to me. I think a lot of the urge for clarity and realism in stories is rooted in the same desire, but that is the opposite of what I want in horror (and often especially in porn). Leaving darkened rooms in the dark is what lights my brain up more than anything. I love to have only exactly enough information to understand the shape of things. The Stranger will always be The Stranger. I have no intention of revealing his face. In the same vein, I don't really see the point in elucidating exactly what Logan looks like. Whoever you pictured in your head is fine. Or if you just want to insert a favorite character in there instead, that's fine too. This piece was written to titillate and intrigue. It doesn't need exact measurements. 

The Stranger's mask, though, I can almost shed some light on. It turns out the exact mask I was picturing doesn't really exist, which shouldn't surprise me. I have a knack for accidentally inventing impossible articles of clothing. Essentially, it's a combination of this (freakishly realistic) devil mask and Lock's mask from Nightmare Before Christmas. All the smooth, featureless inhumanity of Lock's mask, combined with the colors and lines of the devil mask. And of course, the mesh over the eyes so you can't see anything beneath. 

Thanks for enjoying my haunt! Please come again.

I've been ruminating a lot about the difference between a novel and a short story. Obviously word length is the literal distinction, but a bud was recently asking how you can tell when an idea is going to be short or long. And I've been thinking about it more as I juggle writing a multi book series alongside much shorter projects.

Don't even get me started on novellas, those are everything else, man, I don't know. I've never intended to write a novella, those just kind of happen to me. Sorry, novellas, I'm not your spokesman.

The way I see it, short stories are a vehicle to indulge one concept and so the narrative can effectively be shaped around that one concept for maximum saturation. Novels are built on a foundation of core concepts, and therefore have less flexibility, since every single piece has two purposes. With a novel, I'm having to constantly juggle the “present” moment with the rest of the book, both past and future. I have to be more careful about the tracks I'm setting down since there's more riding on them. A short story is typically only focused on the present, or it’s such a short loop or time, there’s fewer gears to turn simultaneously.

I think short stories can be written more impulsively, and edited to make those impulses into something sharp and pointed. I tend not to plan anything when I'm writing short pieces, and I let the questions emerge as I write them. I want this conversation to be nerve-wracking, so I'll write it the way I want it to read and figure out why this guy is so nervous later. I can do a lot more retrofitting with much less at stake because everything takes less time.

There’s way less room for “fuck it” scenes in a novel since that can risk derailing everything I’ve done up to that point—that’s when I end up writing myself into a corner. I have to know what these characters want, who they are fundamentally, then commit to following their arcs to completion. For me, I know something is short because it's founded on a single concept: horny haunted house, rather than a string of concepts tied together: beauty and the beast but they're both victims of abuse.

One of those ideas demands growth to see it through to its conclusion (a relationship that will be tested). One of those is chasing a single high point (noncon in a haunted house). One of those ideas came to me with strong characters (rich boy beauty and tired human beast). One of those came to me as a setting (kitschy haunted house attraction).

(Meanwhile, NIGHT PRINCE is an endless idea, one I crafted intentionally so I could pick it up and put it down whenever I wanted. There are no world shattering stakes, no single kink I'm attempting to chase, no ticking clock above their heads. There's an overarching mystery, and I'm simply zooming in and out of the story at my leisure. I have a list of ideas for that world, but none of them are integral. It's basically slice of life, just for kinky demons.)

The real secret to novel writing is that a novel is allowed to be a series of short stories strung together. So if you have an idea and you're not really sure if it's better suited to be long or short, maybe start by boiling the concept down to its simplest idea while still feeling excited about it. Try to write it in its shortest form and ask yourself if it needs more. Can you give it an ending that makes sense? That satisfies? If you write the short version and realize there's still so much more on the bone that you want to chase, you can keep going! Breathe more into it, and let it unfurl. So many writers can't finish stories and wind up wasting precious time trying to figure out what MORE they can add to perfect an idea, when so often the answer is actually to write a whole lot less and just finish the damn thing. You can always add more later.

I've seen a lot of fear around the idea of "wasting" words or time on projects that never get finished, but that's not how I see it. I wrote about 80k words of a book in 2021 and wound up putting the whole thing down because it got boring for me. That wasn't a waste of my time. It was necessary practice and training. I'm a better writer now because I let myself write that. There are good ideas worth salvaging from it, and there are lines and moments that have been recycled into current projects. These projects continue to feed me even if they don't emerge fully formed. I'm always learning!

Going to the gym isn't a waste of time just because someone wasn't there to tell you what a good job you did. All practice is good practice. It feels like art is the only space in which that notion gets challenged, which is wild for writing in particular, considering most of the time, we're not even using physical materials. It's okay to try your idea out and let it fail. You will learn a lot from it regardless. But you'll learn even more if you finish it.

"But this idea is too precious to risk fucking it up."
It's not going anywhere. You can try it again in a year. Better yet, open your mind to the idea that you'll think of something even more unhinged and amazing to write once you've loosened up with your drafts and feel more confident finishing projects.

"I keep trying and I still can't finish this idea."
End it badly. Just finish it. So what if you have more editing to do than you thought? That's basically true for every project. No piece comes out perfect. Maybe you can't see the forest for all the trees here. Pull your head out of the minutiae of sentences and paragraphs and perfect words and just write a bullet point list to detail the action of the ending. Are you getting bored with the writing? The characters? Is the idea losing its shine? What can you do to bring that back? This is a great time to bring on a trusted friend as a reader and see what THEY liked about the piece.

Sometimes the most important thing is actually finding what you want to write, and letting a few of those "perfectly planned" details go in order to find the excitement again. I know I just wrote about how novels are full of intention and require care and precision but at the end of the day, that's not worth anything if you're not in love with the project.

Perhaps you're struggling with the difference between what you want to READ and what you want to WRITE. Perhaps you feel obligation to a certain underserved kind of character or story and you really wanted to do that justice. But maybe that's not where your strengths are. Maybe that's just not as much fun. Having fun is the actual best way to complete a project, so I strongly recommend using that to guide you.

Sometimes the only difference between completing and abandoning a project is confidence. The fastest way to build confidence in your ability to finish projects is to, yeah, you guessed it, finish a fucking project. A mediocre finished project that you can learn and grow and salvage ideas from often serves us better than a bunch of really cool projects that we only got partway through and then abandoned because we lost interest or got distracted and thought of a better idea. If you're sitting in a sea of unfinished projects, pick one and just finish it as an academic exercise, a gym session just for you. It's a workout, an experiment. It doesn't have to be great. It doesn't even have to be good. You're going to pick it apart like a cadaver in med school anyway.

(Fanworks can be wonderful to build confidence in the short term, but fanworks are inherently different than original works. It uses a different part of your brain. I love and respect fanworks for what they are and what they do for people, but I would not go so far as to say that fanworks can bridge this gap for you if you're having trouble finishing original works. Fanfiction is, on a very literal level, easier to write than original fiction, because you don't have to come up with every single aspect of the piece. Typically speaking, fanfiction is when you play with pre-existing characters and settings and ideas and worlds. It's a lending library, and it's awesome! But it's no wonder that original fiction is a lot harder. Everything is on you. That's intimidating as hell when you're not used to it.)

This rambled on way too long, but I hope it's useful food for thought. An idea can always be changed, but our expectations for it are often harder to negotiate. I would never have attempted VELVET two years ago. I had to learn first that I could finish books again, which I did by writing RAVEL (a book I no longer feel reflects who I am as a writer), failing to write the untitled dragon story, and then completing KNIVES IN YOUR EYES and finding out that yes, I can still be in love with a world even after writing nearly 200,000 words of it. 

I realized I’ve become pretty bad at tagging because, let’s be honest, it has more often than not been used to weaponize kink art in a way that makes it more unsafe for the creator to be accurate.  

If I tag something with noncon because I want to attract people with noncon kinks, I’m also going to risk flagging myself to people who think having this kink makes you evil, and therefore open myself up to harassment more directly.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work! No one benefits from this system as it stands. Tagging leads to harassment and reporting, so a lot of us stopped tagging, which means people with legitimate triggers and squicks are left stranded, and people who are actively seeking out their kinks have to go dumpster diving to find what they like. 

Mind you, I have complicated feelings about tags aside from this. So often, I see people who are essentially self-censoring via tags because they see noncon and make assumptions about how it’ll be written and handled and eroticized. But there’s a thousand ways to write noncon. And a lot of people’s most vicious triggers come from completely innocuous shit, like a specific scent, or a brand of cereal, or a really popular white boy indie band. 

Tagging culture feels busted to me in ways I don’t know how to fix. Ultimately, I wish more people felt comfortable with the idea that it’s never a waste to just try a story and then put it down if it doesn’t work for you. There’s countless stories I’ve never finished because something wasn’t quite clicking, but that doesn’t mean my time with it was poorly spent. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. I don’t even dislike the stories that have legitimately triggered me! I just put them down until they stop feeling so sharp.

I feel like the expectation is to 100% complete everything or else it was bad. But that’s hardly fair. We all have lives to live. I think it’s good to try things and come to a completely personal decision that it wasn’t for you without taking it out on the person who made it, or writing off the entire experience. Be more generous, both with your time and your expectations. Art is so personal and subjective to begin with. It’s pretty wild that one person can have like 20 separate stories that they love every inch of. 

Be adventurous. Maybe your relationship with that kink has changed. Maybe this person is going to write it in a way you finally understand. Maybe that artist drew an angle that is going to open up your brain. Art isn’t designed to hurt you. Some of it will, because we’re human, but that’s okay too. You’re allowed to handle your own pain with care, just don’t make it a stranger’s responsibility. 

There could be so much for you in this pie that has one ingredient you don’t usually like.