Fuck You, Pay Me #11: How to Be More Creative
This is part 11 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter.
Lately, I’ve been working on my novel-in-progress, which I’ve mentioned previously, and which is set in Porn Valley. Previously, I had published and was promoting my memoir, so this was a change of gears, from nonfiction to fiction. As a way of strengthening my fiction muscle, I created a project. Originally, it was called 30 Days of Smut, and the goal was to write 30 sex-related (not erotica) flash fictions in 30 days. Pretty quickly, I fell off that pace, but I continued to write anyway. Ultimately, I revised the project to 30 Days of Smut and generated 30 flash fictions in a couple of months. The exercise was helpful. Why? I’ll explain.
STRUCTURAL
I don’t believe in that whole idea that if you do something for 10,000 hours, you can master it. I mean, c’mon. But I do believe that doing something repeatedly can be beneficial and perhaps more importantly it can take you to places you wouldn’t go otherwise. So, as I stated in my introduction, I set up an informal structure within which I would be creating. I broke my project down into 30 bite-sized steps. All I had to do was churn out a flash fiction a day, and I had accomplished that day’s goal. That went along swimmingly for the first few days, but then something happened; life got in the way, as they say. I have no idea what it was, and it doesn’t matter. I thought about quitting as soon as I failed to meet my daily quota for the first time. But I didn’t. Instead, I kept at it. I changed the title of my project to cross out the 30 (as in days) part, and then I was no longer failing at the project I had intended. Instead, I was succeeding at the project as I had re-imagined it. The first 10 stories are about a porn addict, an adult store mannequin, a male porn star, a phone sex operator, a voyeur, that voyeur’s voyeur, a sex writer, a dominatrix, an autocannibalist, a fan of the autocannibalist, and a male stripper. None of those people, their internal lives, their curious thought processes would have existed if I had given up. Here is a line that I like, from “#6: The Sex Writer,” who has a challenging dating life because of her job: “No one wanted to take her home to their mother and say, here is my new girlfriend, the one who writes about bukkakes and gangbangs and CGI futanari.”
CRITICAL
How long did it take me to write each approximately 150 to 250 micro-fiction? Not long. I’m pretty sure it was maybe 15 minutes at the most. I mean, it was probably more like 10 minutes maximum. I wrote the story directly on the webpage I had dedicated to the project. I drafted it straight through without stopping or thinking. Then I published it. After that, I went back into the CMS and lightly revised the story, not really changing it so much as cleaning it up. If the story wasn’t perfect or not up to some standard in my head, oh, well! It was done. Finally, I added a photo to accompany the story (each story is paired with one of my photographs). Mission accomplished. With every story, I was one step closer to my goal. This uncensoring-the-self aspect of the project was the most important component and the most additive to what I was doing at the same time: working on my novel. I wasn’t so much exercising my fiction muscle, I was starting to realize, as I was shutting off the critical part of my brain and giving the creative part of my brain room to run around and kick up its heels and get a little wild. Stories 11 through 20 are about an avatar, a robot, a cougar (I was watching the second season of “MILF Manor,” which is totally insane, and which apparently deeply affected me or at least gave me a rabbit hole to go down), that cougar’s cub, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend’s father, that cougar cub’s ex-girlfriend’s mother, that cougar’s son, a vagina, and a penis. Here is a line that I like from “#19: The Vagina (After Frank Kafka’s The Metamorphosis)”: “One morning, when the unidentified woman who may or may not have been a writer of stories about sex woke from troubled dreams, she found herself transformed in her bed into a vagina.”
MAGICAL
Is writing a little bit magical? Maybe. On the one hand, doing this project was easy. Bang out a few hundred words. Post it online. Do the same thing the next day. One the other hand, it was hard. In all likelihood, I suspected, no one was reading any of them. Why bother? Also, why was I sitting around writing weird short fictions about people who had curious fetishes and bizarre sexual desires? Wasn’t this whole thing sort of embarrassing? There was a chatty person in my head—let’s call her Susan—who thought the whole thing was pretty dumb and pointless. But Susan isn’t much fun, is she? And what did Susan ever do? Her job seems to consist of sitting on the sofa and criticizing what other people are doing. In any case, I was able to ignore Susan and keep writing. And my novel kept getting better. Because I was reminding myself that writing isn’t a job or a task or a list to be checked; it’s imaginative play, it’s the self on the page, it’s your unbridled mind running with the bit in its mouth. Stories 21 through 30 are about a sex club, a group of robots, a husband, an inflatable woman, a donor, a fetishist support group, a dating app for anglerfish, an AI wife, a woman who watches extreme pornography, and an ER murse who, well, it’s a little strange. Here is a line that I like from “#22: The Robots”: “Still, the nighttime bangings and clangings and humpings continued, a symphony of clashing steel and rubbing metals, a chorus of robot lovemaking.”
In any case, you can read all the stories here.
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