SpanishRed

Meeting Our Muses Day Two: Not All Muses are Gods

Some writers speak as though their words come from a supernatural source—a muse, an angel, or even a god. As an atheist, I won’t tell you that inspired work comes from God, but the sensation of receiving words rather than creating them is quite universal among poets who have achieved greatness.

There are two kinds of writing:

Arriving at the page and setting the words down.
Waiting for the words to come to you.

There is a vast difference between these two states of be...

This Week We're Meeting Our Muses

Only one in 10 of my poems ever makes it to publication. My prose is even worse. Sometimes, I produce to a respectable standard, but sometimes, I’d do better without a pen in my hand. This is true of most writers, although I do know a few irksome ones who get it right every time.

I hate to disappoint you, but you probably aren’t one of those irksome people. Nor am I, but not all great writing happens because we use the right tools and mechanics. Most of my awful writings happened wh...

There's No Such Thing as Normal When it Comes to Sex

In the Fifties, Alfred Kinsey found out that sexual orientation couldn’t be measured in binary. Even back in his era, people were highly responsive to sadomasochistic erotica. There was no such thing as normal when it came to sex.

Masters and Johnson arrived a decade later. They found out that some couples couldn’t have orgasms through vanilla sex. Maybe the libertines weren’t so odd after all. Maybe there was no normal when it came to sex. Maybe that leg of sexual rese...

Getting to Know Your Readers Week Day Four: How to Be Invisible

All the tools and mechanics we learn in this workshop have one goal in common: To help the reader become so immersed in your work that you, the writer, become invisible to them. They’ve entered an entirely new world and forgotten they’re reading at all. When I was in my early 20s I began reading a novel in the late morning. I became so immersed in the book that I didn’t even notice dinnertime had passed.

How do we immerse our readers that thoroughly? That’s the question we’ll ...

Getting to Know Your Readers Day Three: Knowing What You Want to Achieve

When Drew Houston first created DropBox, it became one of the most expensive tech failures of its time. Steve Jobs famously waved it away as mere trash. Then one day Houston received some odd advice: Define what you’re doing. That’s it. That’s all they suggested, so that’s exactly what Drew Houston did—he defined the cloud he had just invented and put it into a simple, doodle-driven explainer video.

Then he became a billionaire, and the cloud became one of the most important i...

Dying in Order to be Invisible

My grandmother said my smile was my greatest asset. At the age of seven, she’d already taught me to do yoga and watch my diet. “Once you pass 30, your body will absorb every calorie you consume.” That’s what she said, so she taught me to watch my food long before I even became a teenager. Thou shalt not fall prey to your bathroom scale. You owe the world a svelte and smiling silhouette.

I felt guilty every time I put a spoon in my mouth, and I hadn’t even bought my ...

Black Hippy Chick Day: A Note About Ambition

If you go to an open mic on any given evening anywhere in the world, you will usually hear an infinite series of cute McPoems that sound lovely but say little. Donald Hall invented the word “McPoem” in his book, Poetry and Ambition. The book is snobbish as hell. Ask me. I’m reading it, but it has one important thing to say: Easy, shallow writing is replacing all the ambitious work of bygone eras. An open mic poem isn’t tortured over or deeply felt. It’s scrawled onto a serviette and...

Neurodivergence doesn’t always express itself in the form of perfectly-hewn sentences and logic.

This week, I got skewered for tripping over a sentence six months ago, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. Over the last four days, I’ve earned the label “The transphobe” because I muddled a few words. Contempt-filled people turned the incident into a fabrication of bigotry. They've insisted that anyone who speaks to me should consider themselves the enemy. I’ve even had friends cut me off. When I tried to create distance from those people, they began coming to my DMs and jour...

Getting to Know Your Readers Week Day Two: Don't Seek Feedback from Aliterate People

My mentor wryly called readers “enemies”. He knew the last thing his up-and-coming writers wanted to do was listen to the very people their work was intended for. If you’re new to the craft, you might think that when a reader misconstrues you, it’s because they failed. They didn’t think well enough. They didn’t exercise their logic. They didn’t read with the right state of mind.

Some people will tell you the reader is always right.

I won’t go that far. I believe th...

It's Getting to Know Your Readers Week! (With a Comedy Twist)

If you use this workshop as it is intended, your readers’ experience of your work will be one of the most powerful tools you’ll ever use. A piece can’t come alive unless it reaches your readers. What we do, as writers, is try to connect. That’s the most important goal of writing, but nobody starts out with a sense of their readers’ thoughts. We must learn this by listening to them.

Feedback is a rare beast in the writing scene. It’s treasured and cherished, but it also requi...

A Story About a Nice Guy

Not so long ago, I met a Very, Very Nice Guy™ online. He wrote me Nice letters. He left me Nice comments. He was even Nice when I apologised for not having the time for new friendships. I told him that, as guilty as I felt, I wouldn’t be responding to his messages. He was a Very Nice Guy™, so he told me that was just fine. He understood.

He really, really did.

As I write this months later, I’m looking at a list of Very Nice Guy™ emails as long a...

Prompt Week Day Five: Fractured Fairytales

Feminism has pushed back on the Brothers Grimm fairy tales ever since the Sixties. The movement insisted Cinderella didn’t need a prince. Sleeping Beauty could wake up all on her own. Happy endings didn’t always include marriage, so writers all over the world set to work satirising and revising the Grimms’ stories to make points about the patriarchy. The trend became so widespread it earned a name: Fractured fairytales. Here’s the end of one such poem, Snow White:

And thus Snow ...

You're Not Real Until You Shag Men You Don't Like for Free

An ex-Fetlife caretaker once listed the most surprising aspects of his employment. He recalled the many men who reported women for ignoring their unsolicited messages. They assumed the profiles were “not real” purely on that basis. Worse yet, they thought women’s memberships should be revoked if they weren’t pulling their weight by shagging Fetlife’s wanton masses.

Since Only Fans took over the front page, those men have been out in full force declaring that there a...

The Little Red Hen of Toxic Relationships

Have you ever met an indifferent man who, nonetheless, doesn’t want to lose you?

You’re the Little Red Hen of his life:  

“If we plant this wheat, we’ll have bread to eat. Who will help?”

“Not I,” said the cat.

“If we put time and honesty into this relationship, we’ll have something of lasting value. Who will help?”

“Not I,” said the man.

He wants you to build devotion out of his constant a...

Prompt Week Day Three: Immersion

We speak a lot about tools that can improve the immersion of the reader—Use metaphors. Lose cliches. Create an evocative scene. We rarely speak about the immersion required of the writer, though, so we’re going to cover that today for our prompt. BlackHippyChick day will have to move to tomorrow, @Woody715

In order to write something well, you must hold a scene static in your mind long enough to get the words down....

Prompt Week Day Three: Write an Original Love Poem

My mentor taught me that universality is the highest goal of literature. If there were such a thing as the perfect piece of writing, it would touch everyone—every age group, demographic, and sex. Of course, such a piece does not exist, but some writers have come eerily close to it.

This is why love poems are their own genre: Most of us have loved. This is a universal theme, but it’s also been done a million times before in songs, plays, poems, and prose. The more universal the theme...

Prompt Week Day Two: Write Words Write Words Write Words

Sometimes everything you write is golden.
Sometimes everything you write is trash.

There is a third option, though:

Sometimes you think everything you write is trash because you’ve gone through a period of learning and can now recognise your own weaknesses. This is one of the most important stages of growth, so if you think everything you write is trash, it might be a sign that you’re actually getting somewhere.

Many of you are sitting with writer’s bl...

Achieving the perfect SpanishRed Life is like solving the Navier-Stokes equation. While climbing Everest. On stilts. With Richard Dawkins screaming at you.

A dominant once tried to teach me a life lesson through the pain of a BDSM scene. I don’t participate in power exchange for the life lessons, but if I did, I would be damned careful that my dominant could live well himself. This top could not. The chaos of his existence muddied every aspect of his life from the career he’d never got around to nurturing to the crack house of a home he shared.

Achieving the perfect SpanishRed Life is like solving the Navier-Stokes equatio...

Crutch Week Day Five: Pretentiousness

As a writer, you can approach your work in one of two ways:

• You can expose yourself.

• You can hide yourself.

The majority of my work with new writers entails helping them to put themselves into their work. That doesn’t have to mean writing in the first person or exposing the darkest dark you can dredge up in your past. It only entails removing pretentiousness from your work. Ostentation is a wonderful crutch because it hides who you are, and Lord ...

It doesn’t matter that some men don’t rape. It matters that we rarely enjoy an extended period without sexual violence.

Tears Animal Rescue has a dog feedback form to help kennel managers understand their behaviour. One of the questions is, “Is the dog reactive to men?” At any given time, we have several dogs who are only terrified of the male of the species. It’s never the women.

Dogs aren’t bigots. They’re not prone to contempt or judgement. Nor can we accuse them of having a “victim mentality.” Their fear has nothing to do with misandry. They've been assaulted by men, so they’re scared...

Crutch Week Day Four: Write First. Edit Later

I’ve been writing a novel since 100 BC. It’s pretty good. No, really. Every time I sit down to write it, I go back and read it all again.

Then I spend two hours editing out mistakes.

Next week, I will do the same: Sit down to write. Read what I’ve written. Do edits. Write nothing new. I’ve been doing the same thing since the early Noughties. I have the most scrubbed, washed chapter in history and no book to speak of.

I’m not good at finishing things. I’m exceptio...

Crutch Week Day Three: Obscurity

Some people write because they enjoy the creativity.

Some people write because they want to connect.

There’s nothing wrong with either of these priorities, but there’s a third option that’s self-defeating. If you’re like most writers, you write because you enjoy it, but you also want to be read. You are, however, unwilling to keep your reader in mind when you write, so you produce text that’s impossible to understand.

Everyone who writes needs to clarify where they...

Can Men and Women be Friends?

In my twenties, I learned that friends who fall in love with you will ultimately fall in hate with you. Resentment and irrational hope will do that. By the time they’ve learned that “no” doesn’t mean “not yet”, you’re emotionally invested. You’re tangled up in a friendship you have to untie. Nobody ever died from losing a friend, of course, but the “I-love-you-I-hate-you-how-dare-you-fuck-you” rollercoaster isn’t my idea of fun. I prefer teacup rides.

...

@BlackHippyChick Day: A Note on Derogatory Language

The Associated Press has a Facebook page for discussing the syntax and punctuation required of their writers. You might think the page would be as silent and dry as a library, but even writers have flame wars. In January last year, The AP was shouted down for using the term “The French.” The argument spilt all over the internet, and AP became the biggest catastrophe of the week.

Once the wreckage had been cleaned up, AP decided to ban “the” labels from their pages forever more....

Things I Wish I'd Known About Kink From the Start

Getting a reference from a top’s friend or current play partner is like asking Donald Trump what he thinks of Donald Trump. Get references from people your potential play partner isn’t on good terms with. The way someone treats their ex is usually the way they’ll treat you one day.

When someone calls you a fake sub, ignore them. Kink is supposed to be fun. It’s not a religion or a professional undertaking. Do you. Be you. Love you.

Nobody speaks about consent as convincing...

Crutch Week Day Two: Don’t be wasteful. Only use hardworking words.

Yesterday we began talking about adjectivitis. Today we’re going to look at some of the reasons an adjective might not work.

• It’s unnecessary

Do your readers need to know your character is wearing a creased white linen shirt from Gucci? Sometimes the answer is “yes”. Maybe he buys couture because you’re demonstrating his wealth. Maybe it’s creased because you want to demonstrate his carelessness. Maybe the creases will eventua...

Your dominant preferences say the following things about your life skills

A dominant once tried to teach me a life lesson through the pain of a BDSM scene. I don’t participate in power exchange for the life lessons, but if I did, I would be damned careful that my dominant could live well himself. This top could not. The chaos of his existence muddied every aspect of his life from the career he’d never got around to nurturing to the crack house of a home he shared.

Achieving the perfect SpanishRed Life is like solving the Navier-Stokes equatio...

Personal Bill of Rights

This is an excerpt from The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook by E.J. Bourne. It's been a treasure for me over the years, so I thought I'd share it.

• I have the right to ask for what I need.

• I have the right to say no to requests or demands I can’t meet.

• I have the right to express my feelings, both positive and negative.

• I have the right to make mistakes and not have to be perfect.

• I have the right to chang...

  2024-09-09 09:02:34 +0000 UTC View Post

It's Writing Crutches Week!

Being a new writer is a lot like trying to build a spaceship before you’ve ever taken a single course in rocket science. Even if you’ve never studied, you expect yourself to achieve at the level of writers who have decades of training.

That’s not how this works, so you will exhibit some weaknesses. You will use the wrong tools. You will use the right tools incorrectly. You will use crutches. You will become overly reliant on blunt mechanics. It’s only natural. You are new, and e...

Terror Week Day Five: Fail Because You Have the Courage to be Creative

Insane people tell me bungee jumping is fun. I do not know which planet those people come from, but they appear to exist. It gives you the sensation of falling without the bone-crushing crash. Fear can be fun, but only if you know the rope will prevent you from turning into Casper the Friendly Ghost afterwards.

Writing comes with no such rope. You might fail. In fact, if you’re like me, you’ll fail 90% of the time. Only one in 10 of my poems ever makes it to publication. I have to t...