the semiotics of my own self-involvement: or, what’s up with the market anyways

Disclaimer: I am a former academic, who has refrained from personal blogging since I started writing fiction a year ago. Mostly I got tired of the endless first-person, the declaiming, of the sound of my own voice. And yet here I am, possibly blogging once more. I make sweeping generalizations that will go uncited in this format, mostly because I have a cat on my lap and do not feel like looking for citations in my files. My style herein is deeply impressionistic, and is, like all good anthropology and comedy, observational in nature. Do with that what you will. 

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Every text, says linguistic anthropology, every utterance, carries within itself the image of its own projected audience. As a theoretical concept, addressivity as formulated by Bakhtin and Voloshinov, tells us that reader and writer are constantly engaged with one another. A text, in this sense, is never closed, never static, and never finalized. The utterance remains open, until it is ideological, and then it becomes solid and unyielding.

All this is by way of saying that every text has an ideal reader. Every writer, then, presumably has someone they write for. In my mind this reader tends to take the form of internet friends, garnered through exposure to fandom and other shared interests. This core group of a dozen or so people is what I consider my ‘audience.’ I write stories to them in emails and direct messages. It is a limited group but a highly dynamic one. Perhaps because it is an outgrowth of my involvement in fandom it tends to be more collaborative, be that in the form of music mixes, graphics, metatextual commentary, or otherwise.

It bears repeating, then, that this kind of writing is about an audience, my own, to paraphrase Urban-Silverstein-Warner et al, ‘public.’ It is a niche group, primarily composed of college-educated women under the age of 30 who are not kink-shy and appreciate both satire and emotional complexity.

I cannot help but contrast this with the audience for the market I have spent the last few months getting to know, which is to say that of gay romance and erotica.

“How cool,” I thought to myself, scanning the calls for submissions on the ERWA. “Maybe someone will pay me to write this stuff!”

Maybe they will, still, in the future. But for now I find the market an unpleasant audience, because it is almost unequivocally not a liberated place. Every link I clicked on felt so deeply proscriptive that I backed out instantly. I have no desire to write for a preexisting market, if that market requires a HEA ending, one standard-issue sex scene per chapter, and for both of the male leads to look like Ryan Reynolds: shiny, bland, and sculpted to perfection.

Contrast this with the world of fiction where there is an audience but no paying market: places like kinkmemes where the writing is, true, variable, but it goes places, it pushes boundaries, it explodes  the formulaic. No one is paying for it, in fact quite the opposite, and perhaps with this lifting of the profit motive comes a kind of artistic freedom. I have certainly found them to be welcoming places.

I write as I do, I write what I do because I find perfection dull. At heart I am a realist in the tradition of the physiological school. As a writer, I am not interested in formulae, though of course as a reader I can see the appeal.

During a rather severe bout of depression I found myself unable to read anything but Bridget Jones knock-offs for months on end. All of them followed the same gentle format of countless romantic comedies. There was safety in the predictability of these texts, and I expected no shocks or surprises from them.

For a reader, this can be a safe place. For the reader who wishes merely to be diverted, entertained, perhaps led to a nonthreatening daydream or orgasm, erotic romance does just the trick. I cannot find any fault with this. But as a writer, it saddens me to think that my own audience is limited by the purview of the populace; the popular may be that way for a reason, but I’ll be damned if I want to participate in it.

So what does this all mean? This is not a well-formulated essay, I grant you, but it marks the start of asking some bigger questions, ones which I hope to touch on in the coming weeks, both myself and with guest bloggers.

• What role should the market play, both as abstract public and buying customers, for us as writers?
• Why is erotica so marked within the world of genre fiction?
• What are the effects of publisher restraints for the genre as a whole?
• Are these rules ultimately damaging, constraining us into ever-narrower niche boxes?
• Do these infantilize the reader, assuming that they will be too easily squicked by dark or problematic content, whether sexual or otherwise?

I’m interested in opening up a dialogue between producers and consumers of what is disturbingly called ‘content,’ about the role of erotic fiction, the formulaic approach to sex scenes, and what to make of the market, broadly conceived.

6 months ago  /  3 notes