Scooter Libby's Erotic Writing Tutor

All across the country, people are asking, "Why didn't Scooter Libby take Susie Bright's erotic writing advice before he wrote his dirty novel?"

I know, I know— the damage is done. Now when The New Yorker reviews his torrid oeuvre, they can be cruel:

While one critic deemed [Libby's] The Apprentice reminiscent of Rembrandt, certain passages can better be described as reminiscent of Penthouse Forum.

Ouch. That was so unnecessary. I'm listed, after all. When you're the Vice President's Chief of Staff, don't you owe it to yourself to have the very best counsel?

To start with, Scooter could use a good spanking with a hardcover edition of Strunk & White's Elements of Style. His most grievous challenge lies in composition and command of the English language.

We should've smelled a rat when Libby first wrote that note to Judy Miller that sounded like a Harlequin blurb:

Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come  back to work— and life.

I have to admit, that caught my attention. Those lines are near lavender with Bronté-itis. I thought, "Those two must be carrying on a platonic infatuation— if they were fucking, he wouldn't be this overt. Either that, or the man is in love with the sound of his own voice."

Well, if you can't get a decent book doctor the first time 'round, you can always learn from your mistakes. Let's do a "clinic" on where Scooter went wrong. I'm going to use my book, How to Write a Dirty Story, as our textbook.

Scooter writes:

He could feel her heart beneath his hands. He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against his. He held her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger. . . . One of her breasts now hung loosely in his hand near his face and he knew not how best to touch her.

This passage violates one of my cardinal rules, outlined on p. 130 of HTWDS:

Love Scenes Are Not Operating Instructions

Erotic scenes are acts of passion. You don't want to reduce body parts to a running diagram of measurements and traffic signals:

"Licking my way three inches up her left knee, I felt her ejaculate splatter my right cheek."

This unerotic attention to the wrong details is what is known as "mechanical" sex writing, and you want to rid yourself of the neurosis at its first showing.

Lesson Number Two (p. 83):

A Great Erotic Story Never Succumbs to Clichés

So much nonsense is circulated about what is "sexy," that writers will often hide their own preferences behind superficial hype, or resort to genre chestnuts that are worn to the nub.

Treacly romances marketed to the female audience are a popular erotic disaster area, closely followed by literary lechery— the leering expectation that, by simply repeating a woman's measurements over and over again, some orgasmic effect will be achieved.

The fact is, most tits-and-ass storytellers (aside from a few true lingerie fetishists) are a bunch of prudes. They love to scream "big tits" in a crowded theater, but you'll never find them actually doing it in a dark matinee.

Sound like someone we know?

I place a lot of the blame at the hands of Libby's editors. What were they thinking? Did he threaten to put them on an Enemies List if they corrected a single typo? Many of his novel's errors are outrageous.

He could feel her heart beneath his hands. Cliché. Every one must be removed. Clichés can only used at the ecstatic height of a novel's climax, when you have the reader by the short hairs. That's a very small window.

He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against his.  Two 'Lower's' in one dreadful run-on sentence? No way. Plus that awful 'arched back' cliché. You don't end sentences with 'against his,' or any other prepositional phrase, more than once a year. Scooter is advised to read Hemingway, and repeat after me: SUBJECT. VERB. OBJECT.

He held her breasts in his hands.The most clear, arousing sentence in the entire book. Look at the structure— No adverbs, no bullshit, a clear action and presence. This is how the Anglo-Saxon language works.

Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger... Huh? Breasts don't hang one on top of the other. Don't confuse us; you're supposed to be building a climax.

One of her breasts now hung loosely in his hand near his face and he knew not how best to touch her. Rewrite!! The woman's poor breast sounds like liver on a meat hook— and then we're subjected to his stab at Olde English!

What the fuck? Is this what Libby plans to say at the indictment trial: "I'm afraid, Mr. Fitzgerald, I know not how to answer your question."

Scooter's novel is riddled with sins. Run-on sentences, exhausting exposition, and a refusal to use dialog when it should have been required. It's interesting how people's writing styles reflect on their character, isn't it?

I have a "good writing begets good character" theory. People who learn to write well commit themselves to the truth, to a fair appraisal. It is the most bracing mirror. You must have honor and humility to be convincing— but you have to put the story and its characters above your own petty interests. You have to serve the truth; serve the narrative with integrity and realism. If you can live as well as your best prose, you have something to be proud of. 

Hey, I just used my ending-propositional-phrase for the year!  It was worth it.

Comments

[keith]

"Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger"

Well, given the content of the novel, perhaps the protagonist was pleasuring a sow...

[Darkneuro]

Sus, BRA-fucking-VO! It's long past time someone said something about bad erotica. Such an animal does exist and it exists everywhere.

[Alys]

I'd be amused to read it just for the bad writing value... but I'd never buy it. Maybe it can be scavenged somewhere...

[C.S. Lewiston]

Dang! In the early 70's during Watergate, it was co-conspirator E. Howard Hunt's pulpish spy novels which suddenly started popping up on bookstore shelves! History does indeed repeat itself!

"Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work— and life."

Sure that passage isn't CIA code for something?

[Bert Latamore]

What incredibly bad writing. Which leg is the lower leg -- the right one or the left one? Which is the lower breast?

Reminds me of a comment I heard Richard Clarke make recently. Asked by Terry Gross on Fresh Air why he didn't include a sex scene in his new thriller, he said, "Sex written by government officials always comes out sounding like an interoffice memo."

Bert

[Bo Babbyo]

Susie, Susie, O! Susie! How cruel it is that in pointing out the frailties of others, we reveal our own! Or at least those of our spell-checkers.

PROPOSITIONAL phrase? As in, "Would you please be so kind as to spank me?"

Or PREPOSITIONAL phrase, as in "If you can live as well as your best prose, you have something to be proud of."?

Either way, break out that hardcover STRUNK & WHITE!

Spankito ergo sum.

[Christian Mann]

Susie:

I am reminded of Winston Churchill's quotation: "From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put."

As Bo points out, one can end a sentence with a proposition. My experience in this area is that this is seldom the last word. Too often my propositions, regardless of where they're placed, result in the word "No".

In truth, I feel empathy for poor Scooter. He and I have at least two things in common: we've both been indicted and we've both had our writing subjected to an edit by Susie Bright. Both experiences are challenging. (I know I just used the word "both" three times. I did it just to annoy you!)

I wonder if your post on the subject was inspired by your weekend excercise editing my Op-Ed piece for AVN. It seems too coincidental that you undertook BOTH edits two days apart. If my hunch is right, I'm flattered. More important to me, I'm glad that you were so much more harsh with Scooter's work. You didn't go easy on me for friendship's sake, did you? That's something I won't put up with. (Ha!)

Love from Scooter and Christian
AKA Prose and Cons

[Susie Bright]

Ha! Christian, compared to Scooter, you're going to win the Pulitzer. But that is faint praise. You deserve better. How did your essay go over at AVN? I had no idea that Scooter piece was coming down the Pike until it showed up in the New Yorker.

You promised you would go over to my Porn Dogs of War post and fill us all in on how it feels to be indicted, and what you think of the current prosecution and defense campaigns! Get down there before I have to get out my Strunk and White again!

[Christian Mann]

Susie:

The last time a woman exhorted me to "get down there"... well, you know what happened. A good time was had by all.

As for the praise, and the comparison to Scooter, it's like my dad used to say: "In a blind man's colony, the one-eyed man is king." Mr. Mann had a million of those. My rage at him is manifest in my passive-aggressive behavior on blog sites.

I have no idea how the essay was received at AVN. I remain fearful that after the edit it no longer sounds like me, tired cliches and all. Is it possible for style to show through if the work is edited to the point of adhering to all the time-honored rules about good writing? I hear writers talk about finding their "voice". If the voice is overly polished, be it in song or print, doesn't it risk becoming pablum, or at best, false?

Last, I will keep my promise and lay down some heavy polemic about censorship, the Feds and my experience as an indicted obscenity purveyor. I'm sure I'll just be preaching to the choir.

One man's obscenity is another man's art. Consider Scooter's tome excerpted above. Is it any less obscene than J.M. Productions new line of adult video? Here's a portion of the press release for their new masterpiece:

"But just what exactly is a Swirlie? 'It’s actually very romantic,' explained JM Productions founder Jeff Steward. 'A swirlie is the act of savagely flushing a whore’s head in the toilet until her hair is a bacteria infested, piss soaked mess and her last drop of dignity is drained to the ocean.'
One might also wonder how the Swirlie, a ritualistic part of every day life for a JM employee, came to be the company’s latest new video series."

I can't wait to hear what your liberal-minded, anti-censorship readership has to say about about such a movie and the gleeful press release announcing its upcoming release. At least the PR was better written than Scooter's narrative, no?

Greetings from the write wing,
CSM

"

[sylamore]

Actually, he used the word "lower" THREE times in two consecutive sentences. Hopefully, Fitzy will soon "lower" the boom on this greasespot and he can take some remedial writing courses in the slammer.

[misterniceguy1960]

I don't know if he deserves a spanking (let alone a Susie Bright spanking), but he certainly deserves the fisking you gave him.

[Vixen]

Great review of his book. I thought it was hilarious. What is it with conservatives and sex with animals though? My callers into dog and horses always end up being conservative...

[C.S. Lewiston]

And speaking of conservatives, I heard a brief, AM-radio news story on WTOP in Washington, about a protest that happened last weekend in Washington, DC to demand for-real sex education in schools and not the "abstinence-only" garbage being pushed by bible-thumping frauds - excuse me, televangelists. For some reason, the usual sources (CNN.com, NPR.org) don't seem to have any details. Can anyone else here find out more about this?

[Edward]

An excellent post, but I can't take seriously the part about good writing producing good character. You use Hemingway as the exemplary good writer. Have you ever read about his personal life?

[Susie Bright]

My dad just sent me the perfect limerick for Scooter:

To his bride said the lynx-eyed detective,

"Can it be that my eyesight's defective?

Has your east tit the least bit

The best of the west tit?

Or is it a trick of perspective?"