In this part of the interview, as Rupert sat in his study with a cat purring loudly on his lap, we discussed writing style and the approach to creative fiction writing.
I: So why did you decide to start writing erotica?
R: Well, it was not like a sudden epiphany where I woke up with a start one day, slapped my forehead and said “My son! You need to be writing erotic fiction! Jump to it!”, whereupon I began hammering out piles of salacious prose.
It was like a gradual drift into trying to learn about how to write fiction. I do a lot of non-fiction writing, but fiction and non-fiction are…very different.
I: What are the main differences?
R: It’s like the difference between driving a Mercedes road car and going off-road in a dune buggy.
When you’re writing non-fiction you are driving along the highway. The subject area, by definition is constrained, and if there are people in the writing, they are real people, and you are writing about real events. So you are more of an event story-teller. There are constraints there. Like the white lines and the edge of the road.
When you are writing fiction, you are off-road. Within the general arc of the story and the chosen settings, you could write almost anything and go in almost any direction. You also have to invent characters, instead of writing about real people. That makes fiction a lot more challenging. There is so much more that just does not exist when you start writing. It is up to you to define it. You can go in any direction in any way. And there is a lot more potential to get it wrong or totally screw up <laughs>. You can take the dune buggy over the sand dunes, and if you are not careful, right over that cliff into that ravine…
I: So what was this “gradual drift” you talked about?
R: Well…I found myself writing down ideas for stories in Simplenote, which is my idea capture workbook. So after a while, I had all of these ideas. Then, when I got serious about non-fiction writing, I bought Scrivener, and in addition to the non-fiction projects, I set up a project for the fiction stuff. I called it Scratchpad, because that is exactly what it is. I scribble the ideas in there, and then I work on developing them. I didn’t suddenly snap into action one day and start hammering out the Books of Loukas.
I: So how did the Books Of Loukas appear, so to speak?
R: Books of Loukas started life in Scratchpad in about 2015 as a story idea where a woman visits a seaside town in Crete and has unexpected adventures. The genesis was a lady friend, who is my fiction muse. We were talking about the idea of her escaping to Europe for a Summer, and I suggested that she visit Crete. Nothing ever came of that idea, but then I started imagining a woman like her visiting. That led to me writing a series of plot sketches. Then I needed more characters, so I had to invent some…before long I had an entire cast of characters. When you have that many characters, they have to be doing something, so now I had a lot of things to write out.
Then I realized I had to describe the town, otherwise I could not anchor the people in real life. So then I had to invent the town, and the local area.
One thing led to another, and “another” became a book section and so on. After a while, I found out that I had enough material for 2 books. By that time, the entire story series was up and running, I had half of Book 1 written, and more and more characters began showing up and telling their stories. I think I might have to kill some of them off eventually, haha.
With a full set of characters, and some better structure and plot, I hammered out the majority of Book 1 in a month 2 years ago, working evenings into the night. That resulted in 92000 words. Way more than I expected.
I: I keep reading about Pantsing vs. Plotting for writing fiction. Where are you on that spectrum?
R: Well, I live all over that spectrum. I do sometimes Pants out a story or chapter if some situation suddenly pops up in my head almost fully-formed. But then I can also get really detailed in planning and storyboarding. I actually spent a little bit of time looking at film-type storyboarding software, thinking I wanted more structure and detail than Scrivener provides. However, the learning curve is very steep, and the software is really oriented towards writing screenplays.
I actually operate in four different modes when I am writing, and there is some overlap, but not usually on the same project.
I: So that is why the Books of Loukas is still not complete.
R: Well, partially. But remember that I have a day job, and I also have 4 non-fiction book projects on the go. So I am furiously time-slicing here and there.
I: So what is this four part writing thingy?
R: Ah yes.
I have four modes of writing (five if you count not writing or thinking at all, because sometimes I am in non-fiction mode).
Stage one is Ideation. I have an idea for a story, a setting, activities, a character…you name it. I scribble it down. I learned the hard way never to sleep on an idea. I lost two good ones already that way. Write It Down. Dammit.
Ideas may or may not have legs. We all have ideas that turn out to be of limited use, or they are dead ends. So not all of my ideas are necessarily smart or useful. But I capture them anyway.
Stage 2 is Percolation. An idea is simply a dot on a join-the-dots image. Without knowing how to join the dots or develop the idea, you really don’t have much at all. So I come back to ideas. I expand the idea, maybe add more substance to it. That may give me a list of story chapter ideas. Or a storyboard. Or characters to bring the idea to life. It’s development. But not full-blown writing. Yet.
Stage 3 is Hammering. That is when the characters, settings and stories meet in my mind, and the characters start talking to me. Then I drop everything else, and I hammer away. I can be quite productive when this happens. I once cranked 12,000 words in a single evening.
I learned the hard way that you cannot force this stage. If the characters are not talking, you won’t get anything useful. I once tried to write a story chapter when the characters were not speaking to me. I cranked out 2500 words, patted myself on the back and went to bed.
2 days later I went back and read what I had written, and the terrible truth dawned that, apart from the first paragraph, none of the chapter was any good. It was stilted, forced…the prose was mediocre. I was trying to pull a chapter out of somewhere…but the characters were not speaking to me.
Stage 4. This is Editing.
I used to make a fundamental mistake of editing as I went along. You must not confuse Hammering with Editing. If you do, you will NEVER finish a chapter, because you will start second-guessing every sentence and paragraph almost in real time. And…I have to work really really hard to avoid that trap because I am my own worst critic. I am critical of my own writing in a way that would scare most people.
This is where truth about first draft also has to be taken on board. First draft is literally that. It is nowhere near the finished article. You also have to pay attention to what David Foster Wallace once said. The reader does not know you, they do not care about you, or know how you think. All they see is what you have written. So you have to work on that assumption, which will inevitably inform and change how you describe things. I have a shorthand way of writing sometimes that I know will not work for people who do not know me. So I have to expand sketches to something more descriptive and substantive.
As for final editing…well, none of my book projects are at that stage, so I have no real experience. However, I will be hiring an editor, and they will have work to do, because, living between the UK and the USA, I have quirky grammar and spelling, part US English and part UK English.
Then there is Proofing, which is more important for printed books, but still exists for e-books (when it can be supplemented by E-book Design and Optimization).
I: How would you describe your writing style?
R: Ooh, that’s a hard one (said the actress to the bishop, haha).
My short answer is: appropriate for the setting and the description or communication need. Explaining that: sometimes you have to be detailed, sometimes being short and sketchy is good. I tend to be too detailed in what I write sometimes. I expect to get the scissors out for some areas of my draft novels. There will be guff and fluff in there.I also move from first person to third person and back again, in order to capture in-the-moment as opposed to exposition of events that may have occurred in the past.
I: What about how you write the naughty stuff?
R: Ah. That is where I will probably get into trouble.
I: How so?
R: Because I am not going to be writing Thesaurus Word Salad. I have read so many novels and scenes where to me it is obvious that the author started out, began by using “cock”, then said “hmmm, I cannot repeat that word”, so they reach for a thesaurus and find an alternative word or a euphemism. Same approach for adjectives.
You end up with an entire section that looks like it was constructed by a thesaurus mining algorithm. It might teach the reader obscure words, but it tends to very much get in the way of getting the point across. Let’s face it, a lot of sex is hard, nasty and fast. The prose should reflect that, rather than engaging in verbal circumlocution and other forms of what almost looks like evasion.
I think what this means is that romance readers might find the naughty stuff in these novels a bit too blunt.
I: Have you thought about playing along? You know, softening the prose, using the thesaurus?
R: Oh yes. But I am writing for me, not to make a living. I don’t have to do that. If the Books of Loukas had to pay the mortgage I might think differently, but right now I am not interested in that sort of compromise.
I actually went one stage further and thought about removing all the naughty stuff entirely and making the books non-sexual. When I looked at that idea, I realized that I would end up with a collection of Young Adult Fantasy books, with no bite, no edge, no differentiation. It would be like somebody re-making Terminator with Arnold Schwartzenegger not getting violent. “I’ll be back…with a sofa” doesn’t really cut it as a threat, does it?
I: So can you tell me any more about the plot of Books Of Loukas?
R: You mean, without giving away the store?
I: Well yeah.
R: Do you want me to shoot you?
I: Well no, I have a return air ticket already paid for.
R: OK, so here is the short-form sketch of Book 1. Without giving too much away…
A lady in her 40s, a curvaceous redhead, who has had a turbulent life, decides to go on a long vacation in Crete. She ends up in a small tourist town, but soon finds that the people she keeps meeting are…strange, different. They seem to belong to a secret society. Then, she gets invited to join the secret society, but to do that, she will need to do all sorts of things she has never done before. The ocean plays a big part in all of this.
I: It sounds like a bizarre variant of Freemasonry.
R: This is both-sexes, so it’s not Freemasonry. There is also the matter of the initiation ceremony at the end of book 2, involving our heroine staying under water for 2 minutes without breathing, and then being fucked by a number of people. I don’t know of any Freemasonry lodge with THAT on the agenda. But maybe I am naïve.
We have a hippy bartender whose parents were eager participants in the Summer of Love.
Two men who used to crew yachts and who now sail charters and take society members on long winter cruises to the tropics.
There is the mystery German woman with a body difference, and a blonde lady with chiselled facial features, but with a turbulent past and complicated present.
The female bank manager who alternates between two long term same-sex relationships and torrid same-sex encounters with tourists. The local government lady who is as dull as dishwater in public, but when the bedroom door closes…she is to be found with the bank manager.
A mystery American-Greek couple who nobody knows much about, even though they are friendly and part of the society…until one day they mysteriously vanish. For reasons revealed in a later book.
I came up with a whole cast of characters. This is not 35,000 quickie words. Hence the 6 books.
I: So when can we, you know, actually read some words? I feel like you are like the working woman lifting her skirt and winking, while asking for money…
R: I am going to post an excerpt from each of the books online soon. It will be novella-length, around 12000 words. A taste of what will be in the entire books.