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Fuck You, Pay Me #17: How to Write a Short Story

November 15, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

This is part 17 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

Recently, I wrote a short story. I’ve written short stories before; I even published a collection of short stories. Last year, I had a terrible time working with a big publisher on my memoir. In the wake of that negative experience—a bad editor, incompetent PR and marketing, the inability to control the outcome—I set out to reclaim my relationship to writing. When I wrote under contract with a big publisher, I lost my identity as a writer. What I wanted to do was reclaim who I was as a writer. I decided to start with a short story.

The Idea. Back in June, I visited the set of an adult movie for a story I was writing for Forbes.com. As I drove east to the location, I wondered how this time would be different from the last time. The first time I was on an adult movie set was 1997. Now it was 2024. I was a different person and exactly the same. As I stood on the porn set in a building where one would not expect to find an adult movie being filmed, I thought about how much older I was than I had been nearly 30 years ago on that first porn movie set I’d visited. In a way, I felt self-conscious about that; after all, porn is a business built on surfaces, how things look, the appearances of things. At the same time, I felt like with maturity, I could see what was in front of me more clearly: the players, the scene, the spoken and unspoken dynamics at play.

Sometime after that porn set visit this summer, I got an idea for a short story I wanted to write. While I’ve written a wide range of fiction, I thought this time I would try writing a short story that was about a subject of interest to me (the adult movie industry) and was stylistically something more traditional than, say, some of my other fiction writing. In other words, it would be a short story of the sort you might see published in The New Yorker—that just so happened to be concerned with the porn business.

My short story would about a man who was older, whose back hurt, and who discovered one day that an adult movie was being shot in the house behind his. (In the real San Fernando Valley, houses are occasionally rented for adult movie shoots.) And with that, I was off and running.

Stewart by Meta AI

The Details. The story would be called “Topical Matters.” Or “The Scopophiliac.” Or “Van Nuys.” Ultimately, I settled on “Topical Matters.” It would be around 5,000 words long, which was around how long some of the short stories published in The New Yorker in recent years were (although some were quite a bit longer). It would be inspired in part by “The Swimmer,” John Cheever’s 1964 short story classic in which a seemingly ordinary man attempts to swim home through backyard swimming pools in a seemingly ordinary suburb. The main character would be named Stewart, and his wife would be named Maureen. He would be retired, and he would be very interested in controlling his environment. The style of the story would be realism with a twist. The entire course of events would take place in a single day.

I estimated it would take me approximately two weeks to write this story. A week, maybe. Of course, it ended up taking longer than that (life got in the way, so it took about two months from start to finish to write). In a manner of speaking, the story itself would be irrelevant. The only thing that mattered when I was writing it was: Am I having fun? If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t do it. I hadn’t enjoyed writing a memoir under contract, working with a big five editor who did not seem to know how to edit, to attempt to tell the story of my life according to someone else’s idea of what that looked like. This story would be mine.

The Execution. Since I’d had such a shit time writing my memoir, I wasn’t sure if I could do the relatively simple task I’d assigned myself. I mean, it wouldn’t be easy, but I wasn’t even sure I could enjoy writing again. That said, I identified what I could do. I could write a 100-word paragraph. Couldn’t I? And what was a 5,000-word short story if not a series of, say, 100-word paragraphs? I would write one paragraph, and then I would write another paragraph, and that was how I would get there. The entire story would be comprised of five sections, each section some 1,000-words. That was doable, wasn’t it? Surely, it was.

And so it went. Some days I wrote a single 100-word paragraph. Some days I wrote several. At one point, I didn’t work on the story for several weeks. Eventually, though, I got back to it. I started falling in love with my main character, who I thought was hilarious. The premise amused me to no end, what this guy living this relatively normal life would do when he found himself encountering something rather remarkable. I envisioned the house. The yard. The wife. Her departure. How he came to discover that a porn movie was being shot in the house behind his. What his personal history in relationship to porn was. How he justified his curiosity, and what he found when he got there. I was Stewart, and Stewart was me.

The Shift. Somewhere along the way, things began to change. I started to feel more confident about my writing. I began to experience writing as play again (as opposed to work). I transformed into someone who wanted to write rather than someone who regretted what she had written. I was writing well, how I wanted to write, about what I wanted to write. Which seemed pretty ideal. The words kept coming, and when I didn’t get something, I waited for the insight to come. I talked to my shrink about the story. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought about my story. I wrote more and more, and as the end approached, I realized that writing for myself was where it’s at, not writing for someone else.

This process also enabled me to think more and in different ways about some of what I have experienced on adult movie sets over the years as a journalist. What was it like for the male porn star? How did the pornographer relate to his work? Why did the starlet say the things she said? Most centrally, I sought to capture what it was like to be on a porn set: curious, magical, dark, strange, disorienting, hilarious, perverse. As I neared the end, I felt I had captured that experience as best I could, not by nonfiction but by fiction.

The Product. A few weeks ago, on a Sunday, I finished editing my short story. Almost immediately, to my surprise, I was sad. Stewart wasn’t the most likable guy—he is stiff, uncompromising, judgemental—but I had liked him. For nearly two months, I had shared the intimacy of his inner-workings. I didn’t want to let that go. It would be the end of our relationship. I had my 5,000 words, give or take, but being done with the story meant letting it go, letting Stewart go, letting a world in which I was god go. But this wasn’t my first time at the short story rodeo, and I knew what I had to do next.

That day, I submitted my short story to about a dozen publications, The New Yorker among them. So far, I’ve heard from one publication, which declined it. In January, if no one has expressed interest in publishing it, I’ll publish it myself and sell it online. Right now, “Topical Matters” is a story looking for a home, some place that will embrace its main character and not reject it for its prurient leanings.

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tags / FUCK YOU PAY ME, FICTION, SHORT STORIES, PORN, SEX, WEIRD, WRITING, EDITING, PUBLISHING

Spike

September 21, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

This fictional short story was written by me and originally published on Bending Genres in February 2020.

Tripp Towers, male porn star, sat on the bench, his penis in his hand. It was late afternoon, and his dick had been hard since that morning, when he’d injected it with the drug so he could get it up and get through the performance that he was about to do in the next room. They were supposed to start shooting hours ago, but things had gotten delayed, and now there was this problem with his equipment. It wasn’t supposed to stay this hard for this long. There was a word for it: priapism. If his boner didn’t go down soon, he would have to go to the hospital, and he didn’t want to think about what the doctor would do to him. Where the hell is Tripp? the director shouted. On the other side of the cinder block wall, there was a soundstage with a set that looked like a suburban living room: a shit-brown leather sofa, a glass-topped table upon which someone had placed a vase of plastic flowers, a worn rug of muddied colors. Tripp’s job was to stand up, go into that room, and have sex with the girl who was waiting for him. He couldn’t remember her name. Alisha. Amber. Ashley. At this point, they were all the same. Expressionless girls with flat eyes that scanned him and moved on to something more interesting: the paycheck that was coming, the tattooed boyfriend that was sulking, the life that they thought working here would buy them, which involved a condo and a couple of kids, a dream that, in all likelihood, would never happen, or at least not in the way that they hoped. A dozen years ago, Tripp Towers had entered the porn business. He had dropped out of a crappy state school in flyover country and boarded a Greyhound bus headed for Los Angeles, his suitcase packed with little more than his big plans of becoming a star. In Hollywood, he’d flashed his winning grin, showed the casting directors his six-pack of steel, and demonstrated his deep desire to please everyone he met. But he hadn’t been able to get a single acting job. Then he’d seen an ad for a cattle call in the San Fernando Valley, and when the guy in the wood paneled room in the second-story office asked him to drop his pants so they could take a Polaroid that would crop out his head entirely and feature his cock prominently, he did what the man said. The first time, he was afraid. It was just the three of them in the guest bedroom of a ranch-style house in Sunland, the girl was nice but a little bit older, and he had done what he was supposed to do while the guy with the grey ponytail had filmed them. As it had turned out, Tripp could pop on command. He was the money man. He could deliver. He was respectful to the girls, the work became steady, and over time it had seemed perfectly normal to be screwing girls to pay the rent as a camera that never blinked recorded everything you did. Now that version of himself seemed very far away, and the eye at the end of his member was staring up at him in what looked like judgment. Over time, the job had gotten harder to do with the entire crew watching, the budgets had gotten bigger, and the pressure had gotten greater. At the same time, he had gotten older, the girls had gotten colder, and the competition had gotten younger. So, he had done what every other guy in this business was doing: Recognizing themselves as the racehorses they were, they’d drugged themselves. They called guys like him spikers. That morning, he had sat on the edge of the toilet in his apartment and winced as he’d watched the tip of the needle penetrate his dick. This would keep him hard. This would keep the money coming. This would keep his life afloat. But the erection had stayed and did not want to go away, it had been many hours, and this was not a good thing. Had Tripp made the right life choices? his penis seemed to want to know. Tripp had no idea. He tugged at the throbbing gristle of himself. It was possible that if he did his job, the erection would stop. It was possible that if the boner refused to abate, he would have to go to the emergency room, where they would use a scalpel to let out the blood, possibly permanently damaging him. It was possible that this problem would never end, and he would spend the rest of his life following his erection around like an old man pulled down the sidewalk by a panting dog on a leather leash. Tripp! the director yelled. “Help me,” Tripp whispered to his penis in the chilly room. His dick said nothing. It was show time. He rose to step out of this place, to go into the other world, to transport himself to where the warm glow of the klieg lights would shine on him to see if he could man up while the whole world watched.

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tags / SEX, PORN, MEN, WORK, FICTION

The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #5

September 16, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

Welcome to The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries, a behind-the-scenes look at my life as a sex writer and all the weird shit that entails. From my recent sexplorations to my current obsessions, this weekly newsletter takes you into the mind of someone who has seen too many porn movies. In RCD #5: I get obsessed with inmates who are looking for love, you can read the first paragraph of my porn novel-in-progress, and what happened when a guy offered me thousands of dollars to promote a sex-related company. Read this week’s newsletter here.

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tags / NEWSLETTER, THE REVERSE COWGIRL, SEX, PORN, FASHION, VIDEOS, ADS