Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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For a few years now I’ve been teaching a class on erotic writing. Most of it follows the same structure of any creative-writing class—we discuss character and motivation—but the content, you can imagine, takes on a different slant. It’s both a fun and hard class to teach; hard because the students are immediately thrown into vulnerability, immediately figuring out how much of themselves they’re willing lay bare before strangers, and fun in realizing that everyone else in the class is embarrassed in exactly the same way, and that everyone is always, always, a little bit of a freak. A few interesting observations: good sex in the bedroom does not automatically make for good sex on paper; there’s no position that’s sexy enough to work without us knowing why the characters want to fuck; and even when you’ve figured out the why, having only an external motivation (“he’s HOT”) or only an external hurdle (“our PARENTS won’t LET US”) is not enough. The text needs to work to get us to the same level as the characters themselves, to feel their desire as our own. A good sex scene has you teetering between experience and voyeurship: you’re seeing what’s happening, and you’re feeling it yourself. This is why sex translated from real life tends to fall flat on the page: writers stick to the order of events, movements, and forget the reader isn’t entering the text with the lust they felt in the moment. It all comes down to creating tension through stakes. A reverse cowgirl, unfortunately, is not stakes enough. This is why sex translated from real life tends to fall flat on the page: writers stick to the order of events, movements, and forget the reader isn’t entering the text with the lust they felt in the moment. Most literary text, whether erotic or not, will try to create some kind of tension with the reader. First of all through language, through small exercises in metaphors. The IKEA effect on the page: language as a puzzle for us to solve—wait, how may bolts are in the package? Where […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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