instead, I listened to our teacher talk about how hard “sex scenes” are to write. 9.Or, that it’s never effective to describe them as such. See Michael Cunningham’s 2010 novel By Nightfall, which contains one of the best longtime-married sex scenes I’ve ever read and includes the description: “Her nipples may have thickened and darkened a little—th

Hesse, Bukowski, Kerouac, Miller, Hemingway, Mailer, et al.

details than the published version. On the first go-around, I left nothing out. The most often-repeated advice that I’ve heard and given on the subject of writing about others is to write the book first. Write it before you consider how your mom might feel when she reads it. Write it before you start pruning details that will hurt the people you lo

Cruelty rarely makes for good writing. It can be pleasurable sometimes, both to write and to read, but it is a cheap pleasure. People often rely on cruelty for humor, but again, the prose and people I find funniest

The female characters in works of fiction by a writer who has violated women are often two-dimensional objects of obsession, possession, derision, or worship—all violable statuses. Or perhaps the men are all presented as inclined to violate. In other words, the author’s imagination frequently fails to transcend his own personal limitations. Once I

My first book, Whip Smart, the memoir that I wrote after giving up my Very Important Novel, was, and I guess still is, a deeply unsexy book about sex and sex work. It’s also a feminist book about power and money and gender, and how, for a time in my early twenties, middle-aged, mostly married rich white men paid me to spit and urinate and slap and

Over the years, I’ve come to look forward to the point in my own writing at which continuing seems both incomprehensible and loathsome. That resistance, rather than marking the dead end of the day’s words, marks the beginning of the truly interesting part. That resistance is a kind of imaginative prophylactic, a barrier between me and a new idea. I

Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.

don’t mean to argue that writing personally is for everyone. What I’m saying is: don’t avoid yourself. The story that comes calling might be your own and it might not go away if you don’t open the door. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I only believe in fear. And you can be afraid and still write something. No one has to read it, though when you’