Adios, Scheherazade

1 — A boy in a small town wants to see the world. He screws his local sweetheart goodbye and goes to the big city. In the big city he gets a job and meets a succession of people, mostly female, and lays them all. Typical sequences are hitching to New York and being given a ride by a bored but beautiful wife in a convertible, or getting a job in a store and meeting a nymphomaniac in the stockroom, or going to pick up a date and meeting her nymphomaniac roommate instead. At the end of all this crap the boy can do one of three things. He can go back to the small town and the local sweetheart. He can marry one of the big city girls. He can become ruthless and shaft one of the big city girls and wind up alone. It doesn’t matter which of the three, any one of them will give your sludge that redeeming social significance which will prohibit the cops from confiscating it. All resolutions are emotional — sad, happy, pointed, poignant, cynical, sentimental or whatever — so take your pick. You can’t lose.

2 — The same as 1, except with a girl. She leaves her little home town, pausing first to fuck with her little home town boy friend, and then it’s off to the big city for her. The reason she shacks up with her lesbian roommate is she was just raped by her boss. Fill in the details and a few more studs and you’ve got a book. Same jazz about the ending.

3 — La Ronde. Chapter 1 introduces George, who screws Myra. Chapter 2 switches to Myra’s viewpoint, and she makes it with Bruno. In Chapter 3 we follow Bruno as he climbs into the rack with Phyllis. And so on, and so on. The finish here is either to have the last character in bed with the first character, or the last character decides to stay with the next-to-last character and end this chain of meaningless sex. Either way will do.

4 — A bored husband and a bored wife. The chapters alternate between their viewpoints. We watch them having bored sex with each other and less bored sex with other characters. If we make one of them, husband or (more usually) wife, the heavy, we can finish with the heavy getting his (her) comeuppance and the good guy (girl) getting a better girl (guy). If we make them both merely confused and troubled but basically nice, they get back together again at the finish. Redeeming social significance either way, if you’ll notice.

Of course, there are other sex novels that can be written, but why strain? I’ve done a few with a college campus background, but they wind up essentially to be variants on numbers 1 and 2. Rod gave me these four basic outlines, and Rod is a writer and knows what he’s doing. Got his own spy series with Silver Stripe now, under his own name and everything. One of them sold to the movies.

But I’m not done with the formula for sex novels. Your book is one of the four basic stories outlined above, right? Right. It is also fifty thousand words long, and the easiest way to do it is in ten chapters, each five thousand words long, and with a sex scene in each chapter. This means that ten times in every book there are euphemistically described sexual incidents. Generally the incident is a straight fuck between a man and a woman, but sometimes it’s a near fuck with a lot of foreplay, or sixty-nine, or a lesbian interlude, or a girl masturbating. (Boys don’t masturbate in these books, they masturbate on them.) This means that up to today I have described sexual congress or orgasm or some sort of sexual act two hundred and eighty times. It may not surprise you to hear that I’ve tended to repeat myself.

I’m losing the thread again. Ten chapters, five thousand words each, one sex scene each. Once you’ve established which of your four basic plots you’re going to use, the necessity to find somebody for your viewpoint character to get into bed with every five thousand words helps enormously in working out the details of the individual book. You say to yourself, Okay, here we are in Chapter 5, which is told from Maud’s point of view, since her chapters are alternating with Adolf’s. Are there any characters established in the first four chapters with whom Maud could possibly go to bed in Chapter 5? No? Well, what if she went to a bar, see, and got sloshed, and started to tell her troubles to the bartender. Then the bar closes, and the bartender says...

So. Given the formula, and (as Rod says) the ability to write a grammatic letter, you too could write dirty books for a living.