The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Writing Porn, Writing Poetry, and the QWERTY Handjob

One of the first interviews I ever did, back in the mid 1980s, was with poet, memoirist and singer Jim Carroll, author of the quintessential streetwise NYC memoir The Basketball Diaries. In addition to being a beautiful, insightful and deeply poignant book, Diaries is bad-fuckin’-ass. With its explicit details about drugs and sex, it was was one of my early experiences of living on the edge, an entrée into a world that I found infinitely more exciting and adventure-filled than the boring suburban nightmare I’d just spent seventeen years wanting to get the fuck out of. As the author of this classic street story and lots of poetry and NYC-school punk songs about cool shit like heroin and prostitution, Jim Carroll had become my hero, and I hung on his every word. One seemingly minor thing he said has stuck with me for 20+ years because it seemed so banal and yet was incredibly illuminating to me — and it came at the end of an era.

I’ll paraphrase it here, because the quote was cut by an economy-minded college newspaper editor, and my cassette tapes have long since demagnetized. Carroll said something like this: “When I’m writing poetry, everything about my physical surroundings becomes part of the experience. For instance, I find that if the typewriter ribbon is running down, it profoundly affects the way I’m writing.”

I remember my ears going pop-pop when he said that, the way they do in moments of sudden and agonizing clarity. I’d spent a year or so in college-level creative writing classes at that point, but had never heard one of my fellow writers describing this concrete experience, which I’d had since my early writing days — not with typewriters, but with fountain pens.

When, at 12, I sat down to write my fantasy epic, I’d spent my ill-gotten lawnmowing gain on cheap fountain pens and a half-dozen colors of ink. I could only write fantasy in fountain pen; for whatever reason, I had to go through that archaic ritual of loading, blotting, scribbling and smearing in order to get any creative juice flowing. What’s more, I had to have a variety of ink colors, or the sensual details of the writing just never showed up. When my epic hero was in his pseudo-medieval metropolis, dark blue ink would do, but if he was on a pirate ship sailing legendary seas the ink needed to be the peacock-blue of a Caribbean ocean. When he slogged through the depths of a magic forest, the pages had to be rendered in green ink or the chapter never got going. When he delved sword in hand into the dark, dusty realms of an underground cave system, the ink had to be brown. Once he’d gone deeper, far enough into the ground to reach the outer reaches of the domain of Evil, it was black ink all the way. After that, the poor sonofabitch found himself punching through the darkest subterranean depths into a fantastic hell — and there in the savage realm of smoke-belching damnations, the ink was always red.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but I wasn’t drawing comic books or rendering any sort of narrative pictures — this was just text, pure and simple, but the sensual details of the page were critical. It wasn’t just ink color. I had a desk packed with different types of paper I traded off with. Eight-inch-by-ten-inch paper conjured a different feel of story than eight-and-a-half-by-eleven. College rule inspired differently than wide rule. I even once used unlined paper because the hero had traveled to the land of the magical air beings, above the clouds, where everything was all white and open and there were, if you’ll forgive me, no rules.

What does any of this have to do with sex? Well, when it comes to Jim Carroll, the author who created such loving sensual depictions of the streets of New York and the scents and sensations and textures and tablature of drug use, that particular author could reasonably be placed in the tradition of sensualists — small “s” — that includes such writers as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Poe, Octave Mirbeau, and, yes, the Marquis DeSade. Carroll himself is anything but a porn writer, though he often deals frankly with sex. But once you start talking sensuality and writing, pretty soon you have to end up considering sensual masterpieces like Venus in Furs, The Pearl, and The Story of O. One of the themes running through those works is the empire of the senses, the idea that physical experience is as real as mental, and that the former can be captured in and communicated by the latter — by writing.

I have no idea if Pauline Reage wrote The Story of O on a typewriter or by fountain pen, or if she switched her ink color from peach to ruby-red as her heroine’s cheeks went rosy with punishment. But I know what happened to my epic fantasy stories when I hit puberty.

I’d been reading increasing volumes of Robert E. Howard’s Conan books, and the many comics based on them. I was well aware that certain fantasy worlds had people who really didn’t wear a whole lot of clothes, and my fantasy universe relocated itself from the pseudo-Medieval-Europe of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis to the exotic reimagined occult antiquity of Howard and Michael Moorcock — which would surely trouble Moorcock greatly, as he’s long been an antiporn crusader. There, people wore loincloths and thigh-high boots, with tight leather halters for the women; straps went across their chests to hold their weapons and occult tattoos etched across their half-nude bodies indicated the complex demands of their warrior castes. Years later I would attend Folsom Street with a weird sense of déja vu.

Sensual details became even more important as I switched from G to XXX fantasies; in the new fantasy world, incense burned in demonic temples; the scents of magical drugs came wafting from pavilions in my pseudo-Orientalist opium dream.

Meanwhile, my heroine turned female, and in each new environment came a crew of fantasy extras ready to pleasure, punish or gangbang her. She was every bit as fierce a warrior as the male avatar who kicked ass in my pre-pubescent fantasy stories; she just sometimes happened to lose. When she did, the story got at least as interesting as it did when she won. Stripped naked and felt up by the mud people? Brown ink, of course. Seized by dryads and subjected to a little forced forest girl-girl? Green ink, naturally. The blues got a little complicated — when the dryads handed her off to the naiads, her riverbound ravishment was related in deep-river indigo, but her later debauchment on a pirate ship was rendered in Caribbean blue. In these early erotic stories, written by a virgin, the groundwork was laid not just for all the porn I would write afterwards, but, frankly, for all the sexual and sensual experiences I would ever have.

I’ve now written a whole lot of porn novels (something more than 30 and probably fewer than 40 — sheepishly I must admit that I lost count some time in the early naughties) and not one of them has been scrawled in fountain pen. But whether it’s the black-to-gray progression of a typewriter ribbon, the color of the ink in my pen, the feel of QWERTY under my fingers, there’s a direct connection between the sensual experience of putting down words, and the sensual details that fill the writing.

Thomas Roche is the PR Manager at Kink.com, an educator at San Francisco Sex Information and has written or edited ten books under his own name plus a bunch more under pseudonym. He can be found at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 29 April 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.