Erotic Writing – the course

Last night was the first night of the five week course, which has a couple of week’s break in the middle for Easter and stuff. I have five truly awesome students and we are meeting in a quite unbelievably kitsch hotel. Only in Brighton …

Next week I hope to have pictures of the hotel’s new cocktail menu launch amongst other things, meantime you have to content yourselves with Brighton’s Glory aka The West Pier.

The course aims are that by the end of the course students will:

• Be able to distinguish the various categories of sex writing: pornography, high literary erotica, genre erotica
• Be confident about writing stand-alone genre erotica for paying markets and about using erotic scenes in longer works – plays, novels, short stories – to give depth to fiction that is not primarily erotic
• Understand what a genre erotica editor or publisher is looking for
• Be ready to send out an erotic short story to a paying market.

We started with a test/discussion - I gave the group seven very short stories, which the writers had all identified as being about sex, and asked them to guess the gender of the writer, whether the story was published or not and if it was published, whether the writer got paid. The results were interesting – some stories they ‘nailed’ immediately, and some they got completely wrong, but what it did show was what I’d hoped – that men can write convincingly from a female pov and vice versa, even when writing about sex. Above all, it showed the students how differently they look at work as writers to the way editors look at work. This is a vital skill for genre writing – to be able to think like an editor IS to be able to produce a publishable story time after time after time …

I had a great evening, I hope they did too, and I am looking forward very much to getting their homework.

Less about me – more about writing

After all the hoo ha of the past couple of weeks, I’m bored with myself. I think that’s a fairly common condition with writers and may perhaps be the saving grace in a profession that’s otherwise like something out of the masochist’s charter. We have to:

• Thrive on rejection
• Strive for excellence
• Cope with meagre wages
• Spend long hours alone.

But for most of us that’s not a problem. We like being outside ourselves. We enjoy the opportunity to explore experiences, places and emotions vicariously, or to find ways of laying out our own direct experience so seductively that the reader is enticed into believing that 'they' are ‘there’, seeing ‘that’.

More than almost any other creative profession, writers seem to relish the sublimation of self into fictional character and enjoy surrendering the personal ego to the process of writing a fully-rounded literary personage. Of course it has its problems – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never came to terms with his creation: Sherlock Holmes, and JK Rowling had hordes of fans begging her to write more (or less) of certain characters in her Harry Potter series, but generally, the writer who finds a personality that enthrals them and that can support a short story, play or novel is a happy writer.

I’m always wondering what makes a writer a successful writer, and this seems to be part of the answer – those who write and are able to set themselves aside in favour of a completely artificial personality are those who flourish in the otherwise prickly literary world – and perhaps that’s because we can move away from our personal Faustian hell into a created universe that we can manipulate at will.

From the Lochaber News: “The John Muir Trust has announced the winners of its 2008 prestigious Wild Writing competition at this week's festival. First prize of a place on a writing course at Moniack Mhor went to Kay Sexton from Sussex for her piece, Cleft, a tale about a challenging climbing incident and the relationship between two people.”

And those who know me well (and especially those kind and generous people who’ve read GK) will immediately spot that this prize - which is the one that assuaged my somewhat irritated psyche during the Willesden Fiasco - has a significance beyond the fact that I’m going to get a free writing holiday in Scotland.

Lochaber, Loch Ness, Fort William etc, all feature in the novel that is currently on an agent’s desk, and yes, the story ‘Cleft’ was developed out of that novel, which does have a rock-climbing heroine … should I take it as an omen? Who knows? What I do know is that it’s been a decade since I was in Lochaber and I can’t wait to renew my acquaintance with some of the most beautiful scenery on the face of the planet. I’m grateful to the judges who picked my work, and to the Arvon Foundation and the John Muir Trust for offering a prize that any writer should be thrilled to win, and above all, to the operation of synchronicity which allowed me to hug this little happiness to my breast while the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune were flung at the ten Willesden Herald finalists earlier this month.

Ben Nevis and highlands image courtesy of coolhawks88

Writing fiction for a living: radio stories

I’ve just sat in on the recording of my radio story, which will be broadcast in the week of 10 March. What can I tell you?

Well, I’m not unfamiliar with recording studios, having friends who are musos or music producers, but I’ve never sat in on a spoken word recording before. I learnt a huge amount about the difference between writing prose for yourself: which is essentially what we do as writers, when we pick a piece we’ve written and then perform it, and writing for a professional reader.

My reader was Susannah Harker, a charming and highly accomplished actress who’s appeared in Pride and Prejudice and House of Cards, but whom I remember best from Adam Bede, where she stole the show as Dinah. She was capable of so much more than I’d realised could be done with a monologue. Actually, that’s not true, I listen to radio drama all the time, but what I hadn’t realised was that I’d approached my commission as though I were going to be the reader, not somebody Susannah’s range and quick wits. As we worked through the story we made minor adjustments that gave her more scope and allowed me to add ‘colour’ to the narrative – that lesson is one that I won’t forget. My wonderful producer, Celia de Wolff, made the whole process fun and instructive and I am now so in love with spoken word radio that I might chain myself to their railings …

And in other very good news, the publication that owed me money paid up on receipt of my letter threatening them with a payment online action, which is the sweet machinery that’s replaced the small claims court for many businesses, and allows one to take action against a non-paying client via the internet.

Recording deck courtesy of Ctd 2005

Making money from fiction – erotica


I’m pulling together the final elements for the five-week course starting on 28 February. It prompted me to go and have a look a the contribution that erotica made to my income last year, but I’m going to keep you hanging (possibly in a dungeon, with guttering candles, a faint scent of patchouli and a velvet scarf tied over your eyes) for a few minutes, before revealing the answer.

Erotica is important to me. It certainly helps pay the bills, but it’s also part of the process that I use to keep myself sane and happy as a full time writer. There’s a famous quotation, attributed to Red Smith: Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein – which is something that a lot of us feel, especially when we’re writing complex literary fiction or struggling along 60,000 words into a novel we’ve come to loath. And to me, erotica is the sweet tea and biscuit (or as I discovered recently, the orange juice and fruit cake) offered by the transfusion service when you give blood – it’s the thing that puts back what the lit fic takes out!

Erotica is important to me as a reader because good erotica is one of the loveliest things in the world to read – Colette, for example, wrote gorgeous prose, whether it was ‘Cheri’ or an account of her mother’s life and her erotic writing is certainly infused with that gorgeous, elegiac beauty.

And erotica is empowering. One of the real changes of the past fifteen years has been the proliferation of titles publishing erotic fiction for the LGBT community – and it’s no longer horrible tortured prose about the awfulness of being a pervert (or, as it was put in the 1920s, an ‘invert’ which always makes me think of people stood on their heads), it’s funny, warm, sometimes heartbreaking, sexy, accomplished and often gritty fiction.

So if you’d like to work on writing better erotica – whether to earn more fiction-writing income, or to build sex scenes into your novel, or just because you’d like to write naughty stories for your loved one … join us! Thursdays 28 Feb, 6, 13 & 27 March and 3 April - £85 for New Writing South members, £125 for non-members (do what I teach you and you’ll earn back those fees within a year, I promise!) More information at:

Workshops with New Writing South


And how much did I earn in the past 12 months from erotica …?




Guess …




Go on – guess!




Actually it was … £3,272.00!

Dealing with writing rejection (aka on robustness)

A former student emailed me to point out that I might have sounded less than empathetic in my last post. While it’s true that I think you must be robust to cope with life as a fiction writer, I’m not unsympathetic (at least I hope I’m not) to those who struggle with rejection. In fact, I’ve coached writers whose main problem is dealing with the no, and there are as many techniques for getting over rejection as there are people. But one thing always holds true – if you don’t think you’re good enough without the acceptance, you won’t think you’re good enough with it.

What does this mean for writers? It means we’re in a doubly damned business – it’s creative, so we have to find that elusive spark that allows us to even enter the race: and it’s competitive, so once we’re in the race, we have to beat a large number of others for every acceptance. Or, of course, we have to get used to losing – frequently.

I came from an industry where rejection IS the business – if you’re a model, you get used to being told ‘no’ a lot. You also get used to standing in front of a couple of guys, with half a dozen of your peer group behind you, and hearing the guys say ‘too fat’, ‘too thin’, ‘funny nose’, ‘bad boobs’ or whatever qualifies the ‘no’ they hand you, and they say it loud enough for your peer group to hear too. Funnily enough (or maybe not) models are the most generous and supportive folk I’ve ever come across, except for long distance runners. The big advantage of this way of doing things is that you can look across at the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in your life, somebody much more gorgeous than you could ever be, and hear the guy say 'no' – and know he’s a complete idiot!

The disadvantage of writing is that you tend to get your ‘no’ in private – and you don’t often have any way of knowing if the ‘guy’ is an idiot or not.

So what do you do?


Build yourself a life. Don’t define yourself through, and only through, your writing. Have hobbies and interests that remain entirely personal and non-competitive (this writer has been making a lot of bread this week, as she’s worked through various issues around the Willesden Herald and the resulting email/phone call deluge which has, to be honest, been something of a drain on her writing time). I’m a terrible embroiderer, but I like to sit down with silks and fabric and spend an hour or so just making stitches. I don’t show my embroidery to people – in fact I sometimes throw it away as soon as its finished – because for me it’s the process that matters, not the outcome.

Don’t take rejection personally. Easy to say, difficult to do. Building a circle of writer friends can help. I knew two other writers on the Willesden shortlist and have since started a fascinating email correspondence with a third; it’s given me a chance to vent, grouch, laugh, and generally kick back with people who’ve had the same experience, and that’s good for one’s self-esteem and one’s karma.

Live in confidence, not expectation. This is the toughest one, and it applies to everybody, not just writers. It’s the one I struggle with every day. I am confident that I will get a novel published in the next year or so, but I am not ‘waiting’ for anything to happen. People who put their lives, hopes, desires, ambitions, and quotidian pleasures on hold while they wait for the ‘big thing’, tend to die disappointed. I am guilty of this, and I’ve caught myself thinking ‘Oh, I’ll book a trip to India when my novel is published’, or even ‘Hmm, I’ll buy those expensive shoes when I’ve sold another three short stories’. Denying yourself a pleasure today (assuming you can afford it) for a future that may be indefinitely postponed is simply daft. Posthumous publication does you, the writer, no good at all. If you are confident that things will happen at the right time, you are more inclined to get on with other things, and those other things, more often than not, deliver the very ‘big thing’ you were expecting all along.

The picture shows rejection bread – with sunflower seeds!

Willesden Herald finale

People keep emailing me, and even calling, to ask if I’m okay. Guys, I appreciate your support, but actually I’m great!

There’s a great line in Cool Runnings (the film that is a ‘sort of’ recreation of the true story of the genesis of the Jamaican Bobsleigh Team) where the team captain asks his coach how you know if you’re good enough to take part in an Olympic final. The coach (John Candy) replies ‘The truth is, if you’re not good enough without a medal, you’ll never be good enough with one’.

And that’s the truth of the writing game too. If you’re not robust enough to cope, lovely writer, then stay out of the fray. And yes, my ego is fully intact, thank you. Possibly even a bit boosted …

Here’s the rest of the week’s news: I’m waiting to hear the studio date for the recording of my short story. I’m also fixing to read through a radio play with another radio producer. As an aside, what is it with radio producers? I know exactly three, and each and every one of them is a funny, wise, warm and lovely human being – I am really glad to be working with two of them in the next few weeks.

And … Ur … Um … believe it or not, I won a short story contest! No, really, I did! But I can’t tell you about it until after 19th February, when the award ceremony is held.

Willesden Herald

Following the interesting developments in the Willesden judging, I feel I should post again, to put my viewpoint. Yes I was one of the infamous ten who ‘were not good enough’.

For those who haven’t followed the story, ten of us were short-listed, but nobody won. There won’t be an anthology and nobody gets any prize money. What can be learned from this?

First, the vitriol this inspired on the Willesden Herald blog, mainly aimed at ‘the ten’ who were called all kinds of names, whiners being the least of them, was unbelievable.

Second, it hurts to be in the running and have somebody trip you up like this. It hurts, to be honest, like stink.

Third, nobody was to blame.

I’ll say it again. Nobody was to blame. It was unfortunate, messy, painful and ugly but it was an accident.

The accident had some repercussions that those who were so unpleasant about ‘the ten’ seem not to have considered. As an example, I, and at least one other of ‘the ten’, withdrew our stories from other competitions (for which we’d paid an entrance fee) as soon as we were short-listed because that’s the ethical thing to do. We were expecting to be published in the anthology, even if we didn’t win the prize, and that meant our stories were disqualified for other contests – now we’re out of pocket to the tune of those entry fees, and out of the running for any prizes that we might have won (and okay, we ‘weren’t good enough’ for Zadie, but we were good enough to be short-listed, so I think it’s fair to say we might have had a better than average chance with that same story in another competition running concurrently, don’t you?) That stings a bit too.

There was a vast amount of emailing to and fro before an ultimate decision was made. It was a draining, debilitating and ultimately rather demeaning process, that I suspect left all of us wishing we had been part of the 800 that wasn’t short-listed.

But it was nobody’s fault. Accidents happen and mistakes get made.

In future I hope that this competition, and others, will think about what happens if they don’t award a prize, and make clear to all writers that being short-listed may still lead to absolutely nothing, because it doesn’t seem unrealistic to expect that short-listing will lead to what was promised: anthology publication. This isn’t the first time that a competition hasn’t awarded a prize – I can think of two other instances in the past twelve months, and it behoves the contest organisers to build this into their planning in future. But the Willesden is a young competition and the young make mistakes, and mistakes are what we learn from, not successes. I hold no grudges and I might even enter again next year.

Meantime, my story and I still think we’re 'good enough' …

The perils of success

There’s little preparation offered to the average writer in terms of what happens when things go right. Nobody much talks about how to deal with the offer to publish your book, how you’re going to feel if you win a big prize, and what it means to be heralded as a local, or even national success.

On the other hand, there’s a massive amount of information out there on how to deal with failure. There are blogs devoted to literary failure, Literary Rejections on Display being perhaps the best and most balanced, there are books about how to cope with the constant pain and peril of being a writer who is rejected, refused and reviled at every turn, and yet whose unpublished (dare I suggest, unpublishable?) prose must continue to flow.

What you are almost never told about is the pain of succeeding.

What happens when you win, and realise that your success is the failure of people you like and admire, often, in fact, people very close to you, because writers tend to congregate around competitions like animals around a waterhole. Even worse, when you are shortlisted and have to wait to hear, and endure a month of wondering if you are the ‘winner’ who will walk away with the big prize – the one that would clear your overdraft and have agents beating a path to your door, or a ‘runner up’ who will get nothing but the pleasure of applauding the winner as they walk to the stage to pick up their prize. Worse still, when you are shortlisted and wait to hear and then finally, you’re told that this year they aren’t awarding a prize to any of you – because actually, none of you are good enough.

Virginia Woolf walked into a river with stones in her pockets. I suspect this last scenario is the one that could send many of us to our gardens to find the right rocks …

Que sera, se-bloody-ra.

I’m about to throw my rocks, rather than myself, into the sea off Brighton and buy a great big double hot chocolate with cream instead. Sometimes, you have to celebrate your failures and mourn your successes, and today is one of those days.

Approaching rewrites in the right way

Over the last couple of years I’ve discovered that January is rewrite month. There are a several reasons for this: it’s when most of us decide to finally, finally, send out that novel that’s been sitting around for ages, and it’s when that indie publisher decides to go for the slipstream cyberpunk-erotica anthology he’s been pondering all winter and sends out a submission call, and it’s when that editor who’s been procrastinating about a bunch of stories suddenly makes the resolution to clear her desk before Valentine’s Day … and the net result is that writers find themselves in rewrite hell.

Anything more than a superficial rewrite can easily become a miserable experience, and while there are a dozen systems out there that claim they can help you to rewrite your entire opus painlessly and swiftly, I’ve never found any of them to work for me. What certainly doesn’t work is editing on screen. If you want page perfection, you really have to work on the page.

What does work, is breaking it down (chunking it) and knowing which part of the task I’m undertaking on a given day. So, for example, I’ll go through my work, looking for tense changes. When I find them I ring them in blue. I don’t try to correct them then, just mark them out for later adjustment. Then I’ll search out passive constructions and give them a red asterisk, including reported speech that could become dialogue, and then I’ll pick out sloppy writing and highlight it. At the end, my page looks like a rainbow, but I can see what needs to be done and don’t get confused by moving between making a scene active and setting it in the right tense. When a page is completed I strike it through with a pencil, so that I can see where I’ve got to, and yet I haven’t destroyed my rough notes, so I can backtrack on my edits if I suddenly (all too often this happens!) realise there was a good reason that something was the way it was, and I need to change it back.

But whatever I do, it’s still hell.