implicated2 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
implicated2) wrote2014-12-07 11:09 am
implicated2) wrote2014-12-07 11:09 am
December meme: topping, writing, comedy (one day late, but better late than never)
It's still December, and I am still doing the December meme, where I post in response to questions and/or prompts on particular days in December. I am limiting myself to 500 words per post, not counting this little header.
The list of posts I'm doing so far is here. Please add more if you feel inspired.
Today's prompt comes frompauraque: I would be way into it if you posted about that thing you mentioned once about the parallels between topping and comedy (both getting an uncontrollable physio-emotional reaction out of someone).
And here's what I get for waiting a year to answer all these questions. I only sort of remember the conversation where I first mentioned this. I think I used to think about the connections between topping and comedy, and topping and writing, a bit more than I do now. Which is a shame.
Here are some things that come to mind:
In writing, comic timing and (if you will) erotic timing are so similar! I had written a paragraph in a comic story a while back, and the first joke fell kind of flat. I realized it was because it was the last line of the paragraph where, as a reader, you're set up to expect a punchline, so the punchline has to be extra good to satisfy your expectations. When I moved the joke to the next-to-last line, the same joke was, like, 40% funnier. As a reader, you generally weren't expecting a joke in that sentence, so both lack of expectation and surprise amplified the humor.
Erotic/sexual/kinky timing is EXACTLY THE SAME. If I'm expecting to read a hot line, it has to be really hot to work, and a just-okay line can easily fall flat. But sneak in the same sexy line or detail where one isn't expected and it's much more powerful. The other trick I learned at one point, which doesn't really apply to comedy in any way I can think of, is that when there is some kind of body-part or sex-act word that I want to use for its utility but don't find especially sexy, if I tweak whatever sentence it's in so the word in question is unstressed, it will convey the information I wanted without giving that particular word a lot of impact. Neat!
For me, topping is very much about taking someone through an experience, and it at first seems to make sense to claim writing erotic or comic fiction somehow means topping readers. But writer/reader relationships aren't nearly so direct. A writer has a relationship with a text, and a reader has a relationship with a text, but the reader and the writer don't necessarily have a relationship with each other, and they almost never have the same relationship with each other that either has with the text.
When I experience D/s dynamics as a writer, and as a reader, it is often through how I create and experience a character. Topping for me is about enjoying a bottom's experiences and reactions. So sometimes writing feels like topping a character—imagining and enjoying that character's experiences and reactions and making those experiences and reactions available for the reader to imagine and enjoy. And reading often feels kinky even when the content of an erotic story is relatively non-kinky—almost all well-written porn invites readers to enjoy a character's experience of whatever is happening.
Which veers away from comedy a bit, but those are some of my thoughts.
The list of posts I'm doing so far is here. Please add more if you feel inspired.
Today's prompt comes from
pauraque: I would be way into it if you posted about that thing you mentioned once about the parallels between topping and comedy (both getting an uncontrollable physio-emotional reaction out of someone). And here's what I get for waiting a year to answer all these questions. I only sort of remember the conversation where I first mentioned this. I think I used to think about the connections between topping and comedy, and topping and writing, a bit more than I do now. Which is a shame.
Here are some things that come to mind:
In writing, comic timing and (if you will) erotic timing are so similar! I had written a paragraph in a comic story a while back, and the first joke fell kind of flat. I realized it was because it was the last line of the paragraph where, as a reader, you're set up to expect a punchline, so the punchline has to be extra good to satisfy your expectations. When I moved the joke to the next-to-last line, the same joke was, like, 40% funnier. As a reader, you generally weren't expecting a joke in that sentence, so both lack of expectation and surprise amplified the humor.
Erotic/sexual/kinky timing is EXACTLY THE SAME. If I'm expecting to read a hot line, it has to be really hot to work, and a just-okay line can easily fall flat. But sneak in the same sexy line or detail where one isn't expected and it's much more powerful. The other trick I learned at one point, which doesn't really apply to comedy in any way I can think of, is that when there is some kind of body-part or sex-act word that I want to use for its utility but don't find especially sexy, if I tweak whatever sentence it's in so the word in question is unstressed, it will convey the information I wanted without giving that particular word a lot of impact. Neat!
For me, topping is very much about taking someone through an experience, and it at first seems to make sense to claim writing erotic or comic fiction somehow means topping readers. But writer/reader relationships aren't nearly so direct. A writer has a relationship with a text, and a reader has a relationship with a text, but the reader and the writer don't necessarily have a relationship with each other, and they almost never have the same relationship with each other that either has with the text.
When I experience D/s dynamics as a writer, and as a reader, it is often through how I create and experience a character. Topping for me is about enjoying a bottom's experiences and reactions. So sometimes writing feels like topping a character—imagining and enjoying that character's experiences and reactions and making those experiences and reactions available for the reader to imagine and enjoy. And reading often feels kinky even when the content of an erotic story is relatively non-kinky—almost all well-written porn invites readers to enjoy a character's experience of whatever is happening.
Which veers away from comedy a bit, but those are some of my thoughts.
no subject
Oh yes, I do that consciously in my own writing. It works in erotica and also in other contexts too, where you can use a seemingly mundane or innocuous detail to sneak in an emotional impact.
For me, topping is very much about taking someone through an experience, and it at first seems to make sense to claim writing erotic or comic fiction somehow means topping readers. But writer/reader relationships aren't nearly so direct. A writer has a relationship with a text, and a reader has a relationship with a text, but the reader and the writer don't necessarily have a relationship with each other, and they almost never have the same relationship with each other that either has with the text.
Your description here is obviously true of the relationship between a writer and reader who are strangers to one another, but I think the lines are much blurrier when the act of writing and sharing is social rather than purely performative. If I ask for prompts, and you suggest one, and we talk back and forth about how hot the scenario could be, and egg each other on, and then I write it trying to make it hot for you, and you read it with the awareness that I was doing that... Well, that's a hell of a lot more personal and it's hard to honestly say "the author is dead" as many of us have learned to do when interpreting profic. And it's not unusual in fandom; in my fandom, at least, it's very nearly typical.
Is it topping, though? If not, what is it? Who am I to you and who are you to me? What's the role of the other people who observe our initial conversation and then read what I wrote? I would say that these interactions are some kind of sexual experience, but I'm not sure we have the language to even name it. You can try to make analogies with mainstream views of sexuality, or kinky ways of framing things, but there's a point where these analogies seriously break down, because fandom is a space that, in my experience, is profoundly unlike all other spaces in how we interact as sexual creatures with each other.
sometimes writing feels like topping a character—imagining and enjoying that character's experiences and reactions and making those experiences and reactions available for the reader to imagine and enjoy
And it starts to sound even more like that when you think of the popularity of the hurt/comfort trope. Maybe hurt/aftercare would be a more insightful label!
In X-Files fandom we had a whole genre called Muldertorture, because it was basically always him. Some people hated it — if you love the character, why do you want to make up stories about hurting him and making him cry?! Well... frame that as a kinky interaction, and it suddenly becomes blindingly obvious why. I'm sure that doesn't cover everyone's motivations for writing h/c, but it certainly seems worth considering as a part of its enduring popularity. It's one of the very earliest fic tropes, even predating slash (published slash, at least).
no subject
Yeah, I think we're actually making similar points--it's indirect, but it's something.
(Though sometimes it really isn't--there are always going to be people who read and don't interact, and I am starting to make peace with the fact that sometimes I am somebody who reads and doesn't interact, even if I want to or feel I *should*. And then there's the permanency factor of writing--when I first started reading Britcom, for instance, it didn't feel possible to interact because everything had been written so much earlier than when I'd found it. And because I felt shame about reading in a mostly m/m fandom when the people who'd brought me into fandom had been evangelists for femslash, and then by the time I got over that it felt awkwardly too late. Cue weird anxiety-guilt spiral, which is basically the reason I've decided to forgive myself for not always commenting on everything I like, even though I still hope to someday.)
One day I would love to be in a fandom where the kind of interaction you're talking about happens more often. I haven't gotten to do a lot of it, which is part of why that experience got relatively short shrift in my relatively short post. :)