If you were going to write about John in a short story, you wouldn't call him John, for a start. You'd give him a slightly exotic name with a hard edge to it. Something scandinavian might do - Eirik, perhaps, or Thorsteig. I don't even now believe his name really was John. People in his trade - in what I assume his trade to be - probably live most of their lives under one assumed identity or another.
If you were going to describe John in a short story, too, you'd draw him younger, and taller; you'd make him jump off the page dramatic, to introduce the reader immediately to the idea that here was an unpredictable man, a powerful man, a dangerous man.
But you didn't see that in him when you first met him. His appearance, like his name, was nondescript. He arrived in a rusty white ford van; he wore baggy, charcoal grey jogging pants, and an oversize, tatty charcoal army jersey. He wasn't very tall. His gaze was quiet rather than commanding, from rather pale grey eyes in a weather-beaten face. In fact it was his quietness which I came to realise was his defining characteristic; his stillness, his nondescriptness, his ability to fade into the background and not be noticed, even in a small room with only a few other people.
He was, in fact, the only man on that course apart from myself. That wasn't so unusual. In fact, it's part of the reason I take these courses. It isn't for the stipend the Writer's Trust pay; that's a pittance. It's because people who write stories are, to a degree, fantasists, and lot of those fantasists are women. Women who write about lives which are more exciting, more dramatic than their own - women who dream about lives that are more dramatic than their own.
And when you're shut up in an isolated house for a week with half a dozen women who fantasise, when what you're there to do is to mentor them in expressing those stories about the life more dramatic than their own, there's more than a chance that one or other of them will choose to act out some part of those fantasies in the quiet hours of the night - and more than a chance that the person on hand to help her act it out will be me. Which is why I look forward to these workshops; why I always pack a packet of condoms when I go, and why, in the late spring of every year, I like to run a workshop called 'Relationships'.
There were four women this year, but on the face of it they didn't look promising. One, Pat, was very striking - a tall, slender girl with a good figure and good skin; but she wore her hair scraped back into a complicated platted bun thing at the back, an overly tailored business-style suit with a skirt below the knee, a starched white blouse. She had a good body and good skin, but it was hard to be sure there was any life inside it. She didn't bend, she didn't sway, she didn't flow. When she flexed, to sit, or to reach for a book or some food, you could almost hear the gears and pulleys click and whir.
Another - Elise - bent all right, and swayed, and flowed; too much. There was too much of her doing it. She couldn't sit in a chair without some part of her flowing off it. Her prose flowed, too, beyond her ability to control it.
Yasmin's prose was compact, tight, well directed, sharp - but all it's barbs were directed at men. She was compact, tight, sharp, too - with her sharp black crewcut outlining her narrow skull, and her tight black jeans and pointed black boots, her narrow dark eyes gleaming out of her narrow dark face. Unpromising? Well, not if you were female, and of a sapphic disposition, perhaps; but clearly, explicitly, and uncompromisingly unpromising to men.
Which left Mary, who was clear and dry and straightforward and intelligent and neatly made, and had brought a good, clear, dry straightforward novel with an intelligent eye at was was presently marketable in the book-shops. Mary would not have been in the least unpromising were it not for the fact that she had once been my elder sister's head mistress. That and - well - perhaps the fact that she was too intelligent, too straightforward, to allow herself an indiscretion in a week's writer's hothouse.
So Friday evening we settled down and arranged ourselves into the bedrooms and set up our various word-processors and portable typewriters and pads of scribbling paper around the downstairs rooms; and enjoyed a convivial meal and turned in reasonably early. On Saturday morning I set some ice-breaker exercises - extended games of 'consequences' in which, first, I got them to add to each other's stories 'blind'; then I paired them up and set them to try to subvert each others' story; and finally got them to produce a story collaboratively, 'by committee' as it were.
Then over Saturday afternoon and evening I spent an hour with each of the participants, going through their work (which I'd already seen drafts of, and had, in fact, actually skimmed in advance) and trying to set plans for what they would try to achieve over the week. Common themes are a good thing in workshops like this; it helps if you can get people to work together on similar story elements, to discuss them, to try each other's approaches with them. But I was struggling to find that with this group.
I went to bed and tried to think about something common to work on in all these disparate works; and thought, and rolled over, and thought, and adjusted the radiator, and thought, and got up to close the window, and thought.
And the thing I kept coming back to was rough sex and sexual coercion, a whole tangle of issues.
Pat's story turned on a sexual relationship which started in rape. Yasmin's story turned on forced marriage to a sexually repugnant partner.
Mary's unnamed first-person heroine enjoyed borderline masochism.
John's foil character saves a few women from a rape camp - by raping them first. Elise' story started with a relationship between a slave-owner and one of his slaves.
I always like to do a day's session (or, preferably, an evening's session) on writing sex scenes in the course of these workshops, not least because it puts ideas into participants' heads... but it's not a thing which I would normally start with, and usually I do it about consensual sex. But it seemed like the solution, it seemed as if it would work, and I fell asleep and dreamed about the scene from Mary's story in which the heroine had locked herself naked to a bed in a hotel-room, expecting the man she was trying to seduce to walk in - but the villain had walked in instead. Except in my dream it was Yasmin who was locked to my bed, and it was I who walked in.
So Sunday they walked, or read, or wrote, or did whatever amused them; and first thing after breakfast, Monday morning, I sat them round the table in the big room we call the scriptorium, and handed them each, blind, the raunchiest, roughest sex scenes from one of the other's stories and asked each of them in turn to read aloud.
It was fascinating, and revealing. Mary read John's cynical, ambiguous mercenary with gusto and obvious appreciation. Elise read Pat's prissy heroine and brutal, uncouth hero with obvious difficulty. Yasmin managed to imbue Elise's slave girl with a fierce rage which I could not see in the text. John read Yasmin's sophisticated, educated, liberal teenager's first night with her father's employer's illiterate second-cousin with cool, efficient understanding. And Pat started to read Mary's bondage-and-mistaken-identity scene, and stopped half way through saying it was disgusting, and depraved, and she wasn't going to read anything like that!
So that, as you would expect, started the discussion flowing, and although I tried to lead it away onto the subject of the other stories, it kept eddying and curling back to the same central core all day and into the evening, and the core was this:
Mary's heroine puts herself in a position where she is helpless and sexually exposed to someone she isn't in a relationship with. As it happens it isn't the person she intends, and as it happens actual penetrative sex doesn't occur in the scene. But Mary's writing makes it abundantly clear that it is sexy, that it is erotically charged, that it is exciting. I would challenge anyone to read that passage without experiencing some degree of sexual excitement, of arousal. Indeed, I was sure (though I did not say) I had seen arousal in Pat's face as she read, in the heightened colour on her cheekbones, in gloss on her lips.
I had been watching for it.
But Pat most emphatically rejected this. She couldn't imagine that any woman could possibly enjoy sex with a stranger. She couldn't imagine that any woman could be excited by being helpless, vulnerable. And then Yasmin coolly, incisively, forensically, pointed out that it was because Pat wouldn't allow herself to so much as sympathetically imagine these things that the pivot scene in her own novel didn't work. Unless she could make it exciting, unless she could make it erotic, how could she possibly expect the reader to believe that the victim could subsequently fall in love with the rapist?
The first time the conversation came round to this point, Pat got up and walked out forcefully. I think that if she had come in her own car she would probably have left altogether; but the house being where it is, it takes half an hour for a taxi to arrive, and even if you drive the twenty miles to the railway station there's only two trains a day. In any case, with Pat gone, we focussed on the sexuality on Yasmin's piece, and talked about how it could be made more ambiguous, less black-and-white. Late in the morning we split up, and people went to their preferred writing places and wrote.
There's a woman - inevitably a Mrs MacLeod - who comes in from a nearby farm to do the catering and cleaning; she comes in at breakfast time, prepares breakfast, washes up, cleans around the place, and gets lunch and the evening meal ready, giving me careful verbal instructions about what I'm to do to actually cook and serve the evening meal. She gets lunch on the table before she goes. When Mrs MacLeod called out that lunch was ready that morning, Neither Pat nor Yasmin came. Yasmin I found in a corner of the garden-room, scribbling vigorously in longhand on a pad. The sun was baking in through the windows and it was stifling in there, but she seemed unaffected. She said she would get something to eat later - she didn't want to break her flow. Pat's bedroom door was shut, and knocking elicited no answer.
It was turning into the first really hot day of the year, and the scenery outside was just glorious. We took our lunch out onto the lawn, and talked about erotica and pornography, and the difference between the two, and whether erotica could be good literature, and whether pornography (if there was a difference) could too. People drifted back to writing, but it was hot, and quiet, and there wasn't a huge amount of concentration around. Mid afternoon Yasmin banged the gong and announced that she had a new version of her chapter she'd like to try on us.
